One of the important aspects of rising to the Nicholson Challenge – raising between £15-20 billion from within the NHS budget over 5 years – is that it is now clear that the idea of this being a discrete challenge over a period of time, is coming to an end.

We will not now look back on the period of NHS spend 2010-2015 and say “it was a strange time when the NHS had to recycle 4% of its budget every year”. We will now look at this period and say either