MORE is not necessarily better is the bottom line for Tory health supremo Dr Liam Fox.

In Darlington for a breakfast meeting with disgruntled local hospital consultants yesterday, the amiable Ulsterman kept hammering away at his message that the Tories would run the NHS more efficiently and more effectively, with the most seriously ill patients being given absolute priority.

For Dr Fox, the Government's much-vaunted Waiting List Initiative is an expensive misuse of NHS funds. Those funds should be used to treat patients with life-threatening diseases rather than a larger number of people with more minor complaints, such as in-growing toenails.

"We need to get away from this idea that it is simply a matter of money.

"It is how you spend the money. We need a quality-based service not a quantity-based service," said Dr Fox, who chose to start his North-Eastern campaign trail in the lair of his chief adversary, Health Secretary Alan Milburn.

The implication of targeting NHS funds on the most deserving seems to point to a growth in private health care for those who find themselves waiting for more minor operations such as hip replacements.

Dr Fox said that was already happening, with about 200,000 Britons a year now choosing to pay for a private operation.

Despite the Government statistics about extra operations performed, waiting lists reduced and new hospitals opened, Dr Fox argued that the experience of ordinary patients using the NHS was very different.

"The Government tells us how many billions it is spending on health, but patients still tell you they are waiting longer to see their GPs," said Dr Fox, sipping a cappucino in the Imperial Express Italian cafe.

"They are waiting longer in casualty, the wards are getting dirtier, more patients are getting hospital-acquired infections and the outcomes are being perverted by a numbers game which is all about reducing statistics and has nothing to do with individuals."

Darlington Memorial Hospital consultant Howard Rutherford shared Dr Fox's scepticism about Government statistics, claiming that administrators at his hospital ensured that the waiting times for routine patients were reduced by referring them to the orthopaedic surgeon ahead of the more urgent patients - a claim refuted by the South Durham NHS trust.

But in an NHS starved of funds for decades the argument always comes back to money. And Dr Fox does not believe that the Tories' tax-cutting agenda will be unable to improve the NHS after years of neglect.

"Clearly it can be done, because we reduced taxes in the 1980s while increasing expenditure on essential services," he said.

The former GP said the Conservatives would only raise public expenditure at a level which is compatible with growth in the economy.

According to Dr Fox, Labour is intending to increase public spending faster than the growth in the economy, "and no one can increase spending more than their income without having to borrow - or, in the Government's case, to tax".