The head of the British Medical Association (BMA) has blamed the Government’s NHS reforms for creating a “bizarre market culture” and destabilising services.

Speaking at the BMA’s annual conference last week, Dr Mark Porter said that some clinical commissioners were going to what he described as “extraordinary lengths” to meet the Government’s competition agenda, citing some in Bedfordshire in Milton Keynes who had spent more than £3m asking 500 providers, including some dissolved Trusts, for expressions of interest in running local services.

He went on the say that commissioners were decent and intelligent people trying to manage the NHS but were being “driven to distraction by the madness of the market”.

Dr Porter also criticised the Government’s failure to find a solution to the financial crisis in the NHS, asserting that efficiency savings were just cuts by any other name.

He added that the experience of every healthcare worker and every doctor is of having resources cut every year and lamented that the cuts are being driven by the uninformed and arrogant assumption that the NHS is bloated and inefficient. However, according to Dr Porter, the savings have not come from reducing waste but from reducing tariffs, which has destabilised services.

Warning that doctors were about to bite back, Dr Porter urged politicians to reverse the cuts or “face a fight”. Calling the Government’s policy on the NHS “economic illiteracy”, he went on to say that doctors will show the public that money is being wasted on untested policies, not on hard-working public servants.

However, he insisted that there could be a way to avoid a fight, which would be if the Government allowed doctors to be the leaders and innovators they have proved they can be, if freed from unnecessary targets.