David Cameron, the prime minister. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP  David Cameron has failed to make good on his two-year-old pledge to combat liver disease and instead risks reversing recent progress in tackling alcoholism in the poorest parts of the country by dropping poverty as a yardstick for local NHS funding, according to a leading charity.  Liver disease, the only major cause of death still increasing year on year in the UK, is largely a result of lifestyle issues such as alcohol, drug-taking and obesity that doctors say are preventable. Last year the chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, said deaths from chronic liver disease had increased by around 20% in the last decade in England while they fell by the same amount in most EU countries.  Despite a personal commitment from the prime minister for liver disease to be tackled as a priority, charities say, no real action has yet been taken and a promised strategy is now two years overdue.  Instead the government appears to be taking money from poorer areas, which record the highest level of liver disease deaths, and handing NHS cash to richer regions, which have the lowest. So Liverpool, where death rates are highest, is rated to be overfunded by £50m whereas Dorset, with low death rates, will get an extra £67m.  The health secretary's advisers say the formula that allocates £65bn of NHS cash should be rewritten to drop a measure that takes into account deprivation in favour of a greater emphasis on the age of the population.  Doctors say deprivation is a key factor, with the poorest areas in Britain recording four times as many early deaths caused by chronic liver disease as richer parts of the country. More than 12,000 deaths are directly attributed to the condition.  The proposed changes in the funding follow on the heels of the government's U-turn on minimum pricing for alcohol. Labour pointed out that in the last three years the number of hospital admissions for patients with alcoholic liver disease had risen by about 1,000 a year.  Charities say altering NHS funding would be the last straw. The British Liver Trust's chief executive, Andrew Langford, told the Guardian: "Before the government rides roughshod into changing the NHS funding formula, it needs to reassure people living with liver disease that they will not suffer as a result."  He accused the government of "dither and delay in the development of a national liver disease strategy, which David Cameron promised two years ago but has still to be published".  Langford said his charity had calculated that the present system was working. He said there were now relatively fewer premature deaths from liver disease in the most deprived communities than in 2005, with the link between poverty and deaths weakening.  The trust said chronic liver disease was now the fifth largest cause of death, and the leading cause of months of life lost for women under the age of 75 years. "It is encouraging that the link between deprivation and liver disease is starting to be broken, but of huge concern that the government may be putting this progress at risk," Langford said.  The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, said: "It cannot be right to take hundreds of pounds for every person living in more deprived communities – where liver disease and other serious conditions are more prevalent – only to give it areas where life expectancy is already the longest.  "It is a scandal and that is why Labour is leading a national campaign to oppose this pernicious funding shift."  Under the formula proposed last year by the advisory committee on resource allocation, which advises the health secretary, the north of England and London would lose funds relative to the rest of the country. The regions that would stand to gain overall are the south and east of England.  In a letter to the British Medical Journal this year, the Durham University academics Professor Clare Bambra and Dr Alison Copeland said: "These changes … are still sufficient to undermine the principle of equal opportunity of access for equal need [and] could widen the north-south health divide by reducing NHS services in the north."  The Department of Health referred questions to NHS England, the independent quango that runs the health service. A spokesman told the Guardian: "NHS England is currently carrying out a fundamental review of funding in this area. In the meantime, however, I am afraid I cannot answer any of your questions about government policy and why there has been a delay in the liver strategy as this was previous to NHS England being set up on 1 April."
British Liver Trust says PM promised a strategy two years ago, and NHS funding changes risk reversing recent progress