EVERYONE knows that the National Health Service is a bottomless pit into which we throw increasingly huge amounts of money every year.

However, what would be interesting to discover is just how much of this money is spent on alleviating suffering and how much is spent on fuelling the vast army of profligate bureaucrats living on the back of the health service, pushing papers between each other and endlessly reorganising the way they perform their overwhelmingly pointless duties.

Nearly four years ago, the health service in Ilkley and Bradford was re-organised from one health authority into four Primary Care Trusts. At the time Government health bureaucrats said: "We believe that Primary Care Trusts offer an unparalleled opportunity for local stakeholders - family doctors, nurses, midwives, health visitors, the professions allied to medicine, social services, and the wider communities they serve - to shape services to provide better health and better care. They will bring significant benefits to patients, clinicians and the NHS as a whole."

At a conference in Bradford this week those very same health bureaucrats were pushing for the abolition of PCTs and going back to exactly the same system which existed before, using exactly the same grounds as they pushed for the creation of PCTs.

Obviously, this is a colossal waste of time and money which will bring no extra benefits to anyone but the bureaucrats, who lay themselves open to suggestions that they spend all their time reorganising themselves to justify their jobs.

People have short memories and explanations about the commission and administration of health services - unlike very sexy television programmes about accident and emergency procedures - make us all fall asleep.

The failure lies fairly and squarely with our elected representatives who should be acting as vigilant watchdogs when it comes to the waste of public finances.

The fact that there has been little examination or criticism of this wholesale and expensive reorganisation, which is nothing more than a complete reverse of the wholesale and expensive reorganisation which took place barely four years ago, is a sad indictment of the people who should be safeguarding the interests of the taxpayers and patients.