YESTERDAY'S announcement by Alan Milburn that as from July anyone waiting six months for a heart operation will have that operation performed free, be it in a state hospital elsewhere in the country or in a private hospital or in a foreign hospital, is a welcome major advance.

This sort of definite movement is what The Northern Echo has been calling for since June 1999 when our photographer Ian Weir died having waited seven months for a bypass operation. Ian's untimely death brought home to us, and Mr Milburn who was Ian's MP and friend, just how far our National Health Service lagged behind the rest of Europe.

If Ian had lived in Holland, Germany or France he would have received his operation within three months - it wasn't right, we said, that he wasn't given that chance to live.

So yesterday's announcement should have been received with great applause, especially as all waiting times are to be reduced to six months in the same way by 2005. We can now see how, slowly but surely, the NHS will meet our expectations.

But our reaction is a little muted because Mr Milburn has been talking about reducing waiting times to six months since March 2000 - it has taken 21 months before we are able to see how exactly it is to be done.

And such is this Government's reputation for spin without substance, a lot of people will be looking to see the first private or foreign operations performed in July before they are convinced progress is being made.

In the meantime, there are still more questions to be answered. For example, while the NHS is paying to perform these operations elsewhere, will it still be doing its utmost to raise its own standards? Sending people hundreds of miles for life-saving surgery is only a short-term fix allowing the NHS time and resources to recover its strength - and to recruit and trains its specialists - after years of underinvestment.

Finally we note that Britain's six months waiting time will still be behind the three months our campaign set out to achieve. And since the start of our campaign, other countries have also progressed and now Germany and France perform these operations within a month.

It would, though, be churlish not to welcome yesterday's announcement as anything other than a hugely welcome step forward.