TORY spin doctors have warned John Major to pray for no bad headlines on health.

But whatever its impact on voters, none could hardly be more embarrassing than that today which claims that one of the major planks of the government's NHS reforms is a dud.

For it is revealed that the powerful public spending watchdog, the Audit Commission, finds that the system of GP fundholding - whereby family doctors are given budgets to "buy" care for their patients from the providers of NHS services - has not improved care and is not saving money for the taxpayer, as the government claims.

And this is no snapshot conclusion as the Commission looked at 3,600 GP practices, which is half of all those in England.

And the finding is that most continued to buy the same services from the same providers, so that the competitive, supposedly patient-benefiting, thrust of the internal market in the NHS is not really happening.

This, it seems, is because the doctors - even those with the back-up of practice managers - have neither the skills, nor the initiative to make the fundholding scheme work on market lines. We are not surprised, as busy family doctors' main incentive is to look after the health of their patients, rather than doing so in a supermarket culture.

This, of course, is comforting evidence that a two-tier NHS - with the patients of fundholding GPs getting quicker treatment than those whose doctors run their practices the traditional way - seems not to have been inspired by system.

This may take some of the political wind out of the sails of Labour, which plans to phase out fundholding in favour of "commissioning" of patient care through GPs and health authorities working together.

But it now has a case for reviewing the system on the grounds that it does no good and, so, may waste a considerable amount of money.

The same, of course, applies to its progenitors, the government.

And embarrassment and the fact that it wants no waves stirred up on the NHS front as an election is imminent is no excuse for sitting on this damning report.

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