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Austerity measure of the year

The Ebenezer Scrooge award for most inventive way of pinching pennies goes to McKinsey, which suggested the NHS should attempt to meet its challenge of saving £20bn in three years by… clamping down on GP tea breaks.



Although that suggestion only narrowly pipped another by, erm, McKinsey again – this time that GPs across London could solve the crisis in NHS capacity by simply cutting their appointment times by a quarter. Scarily, this proposal was adopted as a serious policy by NHS London, only to be canned, in a rare outbreak of common sense, after the general election.

Tea break