“THE Government will increase NHS investment by £8billion a year.” Thus spake our newly elected Prime Minister. It won’t be enough. It never is enough. Expenditure on this “envy of the world” almost doubled from £57.049bn in 2002/03 to £105.25bn in 2012/13.

Dave says: “This is a bargain.” But a bargain for whom?

Here are a few official numbers: between 2003 and 2013 the number of hospital beds in England fell by 30 per cent from 3.7 per thousand of population to 2.6. By comparison, France now has six beds per thousand and Germany has eight. It gets worse. The Department of Health’s definition of a bed is “a couch or trolley should be considered a hospital bed provided it is used regularly to permit a patient to lie down rather than for merely examination or transport”.

We have to watch an endless procession of disasters in the NHS – such as the catastrophe in mid-Staffs and the scandalous neglect of elderly and dying patients reported last week; men and women in the last stages of terminal illnesses reduced to having to drink from flower vases. As a priest in the City of London, I visited all the hospitals. Some gave excellent care but others were shockingly inefficient and incompetent; and some so filthy they looked as if they belonged in the Third World.

When it comes to performance, let me explain a typical case, the experience of consultant anaesthetist Paul Shannon from Doncaster. He reports that 25 years ago his department, staffed by six consultants and four registrars, performed 21,000 anaesthetic procedures a year. He writes: “Now it is 25,000, but with more than 30 consultants and eight registrars. Do the maths.”

Here’s a bit more maths for you: 30 years ago the NHS was administered by a couple of thousand managers.

Today – and again these are the NHS’s own official numbers – there are 42,500 senior managers running, or failing to run, the health service.

This is why the NHS is a shambles. When the number of bureaucrats administering any institution rises to such a disproportionate level, that institution ceases to exist for the benefit of those for whom it was originally designed – in this case the patients – and exists instead for the great multitude of bureaucrats who run it.

The problem is that political consensus means we are never able to hold a rational, informed public debate about the NHS. Offer a little mild criticism, point out obvious failings, and it will be as if you’ve committed the unforgivable sin. The initials “NHS” have a halo around them and to suggest that perhaps not everything in that institution is absolutely wonderful is to put yourself beyond the pale. I know of critics who have received death-threats.

We are ludicrously sentimental about the health service. And when sentimentality walks in at the door, realistic appraisal flies out of the window.

I certainly believe our country needs a properly funded, efficient health service. We don’t want to see the population suffering and dying from curable conditions. But it is as plain as the nose on your face that we don’t have a functioning health service at present. There are alternative ways of running (and paying for) public health. In France and Germany they do these things differently – and better.

Why is it regarded as heresy to mention this fact? Do I want a health service? Yes, yes, yes. But not the one we’ve got. Let us have that honest debate, prevented for so long by our mawkish attachment to a failed institution.