Labour attacked over health and tax

The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives today both attacked Labour over tax and the health service.

As the government announced a fall in NHS waiting lists and promised not to raise income tax, Labour was accused of making unrealistic political claims.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, said its concentration on waiting lists had "skewed" waiting times, which were more important to patients.

He also said Labour was being "timid" over its income tax pledge and accused it of suffering from a "terrible poverty of ambition".

Figures published today showed that the number of people waiting for inpatient NHS treatment in England fell by 26,100 to 1,006,600 in March. This matched a 1997 election promise to take 100,000 people off the inpatient total in the first term of a Labour government.

The shadow health secretary, Liam Fox, said the current NHS waiting list figures did not include outpatients - the so-called waiting list to get on the waiting list.

He said the government had put politics ahead of patients.

"Patients should believe their own experiences - not Labour's fiddled figures," he said. "Labour are still more obsessed with spin doctors than doctors."

But the prime minister, Tony Blair, said today that the economy was the "single most important thing" in the election campaign, and warned that Tory tax cuts would lead to a return to economic instability and underfunding of the NHS.

He welcomed the waiting list figures and promised "top to bottom" reform of the health service in a second term of government.

During an address to staff at a hospital in Greenwich, south east London, the prime minister acknowledged that there remained "a very great deal more to do" before the NHS was thoroughly modernised.

Mr Blair said that Labour could fund its public spending plans ? on education, police and the NHS - by reducing the national debt, and denied that the government would find it impossible to follow them through in a second term.

At the launch of his party's Scottish manifesto, Mr Hague threw down a challenge to Mr Blair to pledge not to increase the tax burden at all.

"Today we are told that Tony Blair will promise not to increase income tax," he said. "This, of course, is exactly what he said at the last election and he then went on to break his promise by abolishing the married couples allowance and mortgage relief.

"So I challenge him today to say that he will not increase taxes at all, and if he is not prepared to say that, everyone will know he plans yet more stealth taxes on the people of Britain."

The shadow chancellor, Michael Portillo, had earlier defended the Tories' manifesto pledge to offer ?8bn worth of tax cuts in the next two years.

"The sums add up. They are all set out in the manifesto. They enable us to offer huge tax savings to people trying to save, huge tax savings to pensioners and to families," he said.

To demonstrate the impact of the party's proposed 6p reduction in tax on a litre of petrol, Mr Portillo visited a car showroom in south London. He said the Ford Mondeo driven by Mondeo Man - targeted by Labour in the 1997 election - would be ?3.69 cheaper to fill if the Tories won the election.

Labour sent an advertising van to the event, carrying a poster with a picture of a 16-year-old William Hague at a Tory conference, under the slogan "Someone didn't do his homework - who thinks the Tory manifesto sums add up? Just William."

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy denounced the Tory petrol pledge as a "cheap populist gimmick".

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