Tom Brake's response, 24th January, to my letter of 10th January, misquotes and misrepresents what the UK Statistical Authority's Andrew Dilnot said in his letter of 4th December to Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt.

Dilnot's letter said: "The most authoritative source of National Statistics on the subject would seem to be the Treasury publication Public Spending Statistics, and I note that these figures were used in a Department of Health Press Release in July 2012." This July version shows NHS spending down in real terms for both years of the Coalition.

Dilnot's letter concludes: "On the basis of these figures, we would conclude that expenditure on the NHS in real terms was lower in 2011-12 than it was in 2009-10." The letter thus confirmed that the Tories had broken an election pledge to increase NHS spending year on year.

Brake's response said: 'Mr Dilnot actually acknowledges that for the first year of this Government's spending review "NHS spending increased in real terms compared with the previous year by 0.1 per cent... [and] will continue to increase in real terms during every year of the current spending review settlement"'.

Tom Brake used inverted commas (a common convention) to imply that Andrew Dilnot said those words, whereas Dilnot said no such words. Brake also rounded up Dilnot's figure to make it appear the coalition was spending more on health care than it was.

In fact the same words appeared in a BBC piece: 'Ministers rebuked on NHS spending claim', 4th December, on the web, attributed to a Department for Health spokesman. The same quote and rounding up was also used by Tory Health Minister, Norman Lamb, who also mis-attributed it to Dilnot, in parliament on 12th December. A Tory and a Lib-Dem both speaking with 'forked tongues'.

David Murray