OFFICIAL estimates of the productivity performance of the health service were cut yesterday as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that improved statistical methods gave a smaller boost to the output of the NHS than it had previously thought.

The ONS released new figures showing the impact of further improvements to the measurement of the output of services in the public sector.

Its report was the latest part of its effort to produce more accurate statistics on the performance of the public services after a review by Professor Sir Tony Atkinson, published in January.

Yesterday’s figures showed that an earlier, initial overhaul of the NHS performance data following recommendations from Sir Tony produced too rosy a view. The new figures scaled back estimated growth of services delivered by the health service between 1995 and 2003 by 1.4 per cent.

NHS output is now estimated to have risen 27.2 per cent, rather than the 28.6 shown in rejigged numbers released last year.

Last year’s overhaul of the data boosted the growth of NHS output between 2001 and 2003 from between 2 and 2.5 per cent a year to levels above 4 per cent. But yesterday’s figures pared back the figures for 2002 and 2003 to 3.7 per cent.

There was better news for the Government in the fields of education and personal social services. In education, growth in services delivered from 1995 to 2003 was revised up by 2.1 percentage points, to 9.4 per cent.

But falling numbers of claimants meant declining efficiency in the administration of social security, so that, for the money spent, output in this area is now shown to have fallen by 11.6 per cent, rather than the 5.5 per cent drop previously estimated.

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