At this point UK government services don’t need reform, they need funding. Austerity has absolutely crippled everything.
We'd all like public services that do everything for everyone but few of us would be willing to pay what that would actually cost and many of us literally couldn't afford it. Meanwhile expectations of government services are rising and in many areas demographics are against us. If you rule out reform of government services then you don't have a lot of options left to square a lot of circles.
It's important to consider that "reform" is not the same as "cutting standards". For example if we could redistribute the available resources for health and social care to focus more on prevention than cure then many problems might be detected and dealt with earlier resulting in lower overall costs and crucially also better outcomes for patients. Of course there is so much firefighting happening in the NHS now that it's hard to see how any radical reform could happen without a huge injection of both cash and trained medical staff over a period longer than a single electoral cycle and that makes it a political problem as much as an economic or healthcare one.
Most of these reforms have included injecting private sector and internal markets into the system.
You may agree or disagree with these reforms, but it's difficult to argue that they don't incur overhead. Outsourced contracts need administration, legal frameworks; private parties take profit or else they wouldn't exist.
I'd argue it is likely that most of the extra funding is seeping out through these reforms, plus the legacy of not nationalising the whole health system - GP surgeries, pharmacy, generic drug manufacturing - when the NHS was formed.
I agree with you on the prevention aspect. but my thought is that a more joined up system including GPs, pharmacy and especially social care, would manage a lot of lifestyle related issues much better.
There are probably a lot of real costs in our current healthcare system that never make it onto the books as well. For example in many parts of the country it is impossible for an adult to register with a dentist as an NHS patient right now. There are zero dental practices within a reasonable distance of many people willing to accept new NHS patients. That appears to be because the deal governments currently offer to NHS dentists makes no sense financially so it's hard to blame the dentists. But the effect is the same - many of those people are not getting regular dental check ups and preventative or early treatments. The ones who are went private and paid themselves.
That's money going into private healthcare not from the tax man but from the individual patient but that still means the individual patient no longer has that money to be able to afford higher taxes that could better fund the NHS. Unfortunately the lack of huge public outcry as this frog has been boiled only proves that a government strategy of slowly eroding even essential healthcare provision to encourage privatisation by the back door can be effective.