David Cameron has stepped up his bid to make the Tories the party of the NHS

David Cameron has stepped up his bid to make the Tories the party of the NHS by promising reforms to cut costs and extend "patient power".

The Conservative leader repeated his pledge to ring-fence the health budget, but insisted that money would be better spent.

The £4.5 billion annual bill for administering the NHS is "astonishing", and must be slashed by a third over the next four years, he said.

In a speech in London setting out Tory priorities for the NHS, Mr Cameron insisted: "Spending on the NHS cannot stand still. But that does not mean we are simply going to pour money in as Labour have done. If we change nothing, and if productivity keeps falling at the rate it is today, then even with real-terms increases in spending we couldn't hope to cope with the pressures on the NHS.

"That's why, as well as those increases, we urgently need reform to make our whole health service more efficient. We are determined that a Conservative pound will go much further than a Labour pound."

Mr Cameron said closures of A&E and maternity units as part of reorganisations would be halted. Top-down targets had "drained morale to an all-time low and wasted time and money" and would be scrapped, giving doctors and nurses freedom to take decisions based on "clinical imperatives", according to the Tory leader.

But Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: "David Cameron's 'vision' for the NHS appears to be little more than a series of vacuous contradictory gimmicks.

"The Tories claim they will sort out the NHS funding shortfalls but at the same time they're planning to spend billions providing single rooms to every patient that wants one. They've called for a cut in quangos while at the same time planning to set up a new unaccountable quango to run the NHS. And their policies to remove any mechanism to guarantee patients access to treatment will simply lead to the enormous waiting times we saw under the last Tory government."