Up to 15 per cent of all NHS operations will in future be carried out by the private sector, thanks to massive extra funding due to be announced by Patricia Hewitt, the new Health Secretary, later today.

Ms Hewitt will say that £3 billion will be spent over the next five years on providing some 1.7 million operations by independent providers to NHS patients.

The Government intends that the operations, expected to cover elective surgery such as hip and knee replacements, will help the NHS in England meet its target waiting time of a maximum of 18 weeks from a patient’s GP referral to the operating table, within three years.

Ms Hewitt denied that the plan amounted to dismantling of the NHS by stealth. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, she said: "Of course we are not dismantling the NHS. We are reforming and we will transform the NHS so that it is far better for patients. It will be different, and it will be better."

She said it would be "completely crazy" to close existing health institutions and replace them with private providers. The Government was simply finding new and better methods of healthcare, she said.

"As we extend more choice to patients … that will keep improving the standards and quality of performance right across the system," Ms Hewitt said.

There would be no "arbitrary limits" on the number of operations done by the private sector, she said, but she expected the figure could be as high as 15 per cent.

The new approach would see an end to the expensive practice of NHS trusts buying operations at private hospitals to treat patients who had been waiting for months.

Ms Hewitt said the Government would also be talking with the British Medical Association about the role that independent providers could play in providing training for students and junior doctors.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said that standards in the health service would suffer if an increasing number of operations were performed by the private sector. "If you deprive NHS hospitals of routine work, how can they sustain the emergency work?" he told Today.

He agreed with the principle of independent providers playing a role in the NHS, but pointed out they would be more expensive for the taxpayer than performing operations in public hospitals.

However, the Tories would not limit the number of operations performed by private firms, Mr Lansley said.

Ms Hewitt will make her first speech as Health Secretary at a conference on workforce issues in the NHS in Birmingham later today.

Sir Nigel Crisp, chief executive of the NHS, will release his latest report on the health service at today’s meeting. It is expected to indicate that a number of key targets, such as a maximum four-hour wait in A&E - are being met in England’s hospitals.

It was also set to show that all patients needing a heart by-pass operation are now treated within three months - four years ahead of the target set in the NHS plan.

Waiting lists were falling "far faster than anybody believed possible", Ms Hewitt said.

She will welcome the latest waiting list figures which are set to show a dramatic fall in the number of people waiting for an NHS operation in England. The last set of waiting list figures, published in April, showed that the number of patients waiting for an operation in England had fallen by 16,700 in a month.

At the end of February there were 845,200 on the NHS waiting list, down from 861,900 in January and a drop of 96,000 since February last year. The fall followed two months that saw waiting times rise by a total of 18,000 during the busy winter period in December and January.

Ms Hewitt said she was determined to implement plans to create a patient-led NHS: "Over the next three months I will be doing a lot of listening and learning from the real experts - patients and staff."

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