If you’re in government, setting up a listening exercise must seem a good idea. You’re there to serve the people so why not ask the people what they want?

The first reason why not is that not everyone takes the opportunity to offer up ideas completely seriously. Back in 2016, the Natural Environment Research Council asked for suggestions for a name for a new polar research ship.

The runaway winner was Boaty McBoatface, which then science minister Jo Johnson miserably eschewed in favour of the fourth placed RRS Sir David Attenborough (one of the ship’s sub-sea vehicles was eventually named Boaty as a sop).

Johnson probably had a couple of flashbacks this week as Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting launched what they described as the ‘biggest consultation in NHS history’.

Following Lord Darzi’s report into the desperate state of the National Health Service, the government launched change.nhs.uk, asking the public for ideas to ‘help build a health service for the future’.

It didn’t take long for the Boaty McBoatface crowd to come out in force, with suggestions including a Wetherspoons for every hospital meal, playing videos of Theresa May dancing in A&E waiting rooms to make people leave, and firing Wes Streeting out of a cannon to help raise funds.

But behind the humour, there is a more serious point here. Lord Darzi’s report described an NHS ‘in critical condition’.

For over a decade it has continually missed targets for waiting times, whether for A&E or routine hospital appointments: back in 2010, there were 2.4 million waiting for hospital appointments; now it’s 7.6 million.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t brilliant people doing brilliant things in the health service. I’ve experienced that myself, but I’ve also experienced the decline in our local GP services here in Salisbury, once being told the earliest I could see a doctor was six weeks. Something clearly has to give.

Which leads to the second problem of asking people what they want. Do people want better health services? Absolutely.

Do they want to pay higher taxes to pay for them? Absolutely not. Which leads any government with a difficult balancing act, one made harder by an ageing population with increasing health demands.

Just pumping more money in, even if it was somehow available, isn’t the answer. One of the big challenges for the NHS is to increase its productivity levels – while the NHS workforce has gone up by 17 per cent in recent years, the number of patients treated by emergency clinicians has fallen by 18 per cent. Darzi’s report described the NHS as still being ‘in the foothills’ of the digital revolution. Could AI rescue A&E? Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long for the results.