We'll make GPs pay for their NHS failures, say Tories

The party has vowed to make health service workers more accountable for the running of the NHS.

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley is to publish today what would have been the party's first piece of legislation if it had won an autumn election - an NHS "autonomy and accountability bill" giving senior doctors control of local budgets.

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This comes the day after an election would have been held, if Gordon Brown had not backed away from the idea.

Under the Tory plan, the new frontline "primary care commissioners" would face salary cuts if they did not come up to scratch on waiting lists and standards of treatment.

Patients would also be allowed to have treatment at any hospital they choose, whether in the public or private sector, as long as it delivers care at or below the NHS cost.

Mr Cameron will claim the NHS matters too much to be treated "like a political football".

He will also vow to end all centrally-imposed targets.

The initiative comes after the Tory leader claimed there was an "unmistakable whiff of decay" about Gordon Brown's Government.

Taunting the Prime Minister over the election that never was, the Conservative leader yesterday said his "incompetence" was being revealed on a daily basis, with "U-turns every Monday, Wednesday and Friday".

Mr Cameron claimed Labour was "stumbling around looking for a vision".

He sought to cast Mr Brown as Britain's "bureaucrat-in-chief", at the head of an "army of interventionism".

Speaking to prospective candidates and party activists in his Oxfordshire constituency, Mr Cameron said: "Today could have been the day that we put them out of their misery. It wasn't to be, but cheer up. They can't hang on forever.

"Soon there will be a new team in charge. Change may have been delayed, but I promise that change is on its way."

The Tory leader said he was confident that his party would win whenever Mr Brown decided to go to the polls because Britain increasingly realised a "new government was the only way to move forward".

He added: "There times in politics when you just know that change is coming. When there is a sea change in ideas, a big shift in attitudes."

Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 and Tony Blair's in 1997 had been the last examples of such fundamental change, he added.

The Tory leader said voters had grown tired of Labour's "nationalisation of our society" and its belief that real social change could be achieved by "the benign intervention of an army of bureaucrats".

The only way public services would be improved was by setting them free of state control, he claimed.

But he warned: "This Prime Minister is never going to change, he is never going to give up the top-down targets and central control. It's in his nature, it's his philosophy.

"But unfortunately for him, it's history."

Labour has accused the Tories of plotting to take Britain out of Europe.

The Conservatives' latest advert lists a referendum on the new EU constitution as one of the pledges delayed until the party wins an election.

Europe Minister Jim Murphy said: "Unless they tell us otherwise, it appears this poster unequivocally commits the Tories to a vote on the EU treaty even after it has been ratified - a commitment that, if honoured, would lead to chaos."