FORMER South Somerset MP David Laws has continued his scathing attack on the government in a new, tell-all book – saying NHS bosses "were leant on" to create a debt figure.

Liberal Democrat Mr Laws, who was MP for the area from 2001 until 2015, has released a new book called Coalition, exposing the inner workings of the previous government.

He has made a number of bombshell claims in the book, including Prime Minister David Cameron is "petrified" of Boris Johnson, and that chancellor George Osborne wanted to sack former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith four years ago.

During his time in office, Mr Laws was appointed as the minister of state for schools and the Cabinet Office, but was defeated in last year’s general election by Conservative MP Marcus Fysh.

The book is being serialised in The Mail on Sunday, and last weekend, Mr Laws also appeared on The Andrew Marr Show, where he claimed that David Cameron and George Osborne "strong-armed" NHS chief executive Simon Stevens to downplay the financial crisis facing the health service.

Speaking to Andrew Marr, Mr Laws repeated claims he made in his book that Mr Stevens produced a report saying that the NHS needed another £16 billion a year by 2020 to keep the service going.

But according to Mr Laws, the response from Downing Street was told to “get that figure down”, to which he did to £8 billion a year and which then became a focus point of the Conservative’s election manifesto.

Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, Mr Laws added: “The problems seems to be that when he took that figure to the Conservatives and No 10 they said ‘you must be kidding, there’s no way the chancellor and the prime minister will sign up to that figure. You’d better get that figure down if you want us to take this seriously.

“You’d better increase the efficiency savings – and he did that and therefore reduced the demand to £8 billion.

“We now therefore as a consequence have the NHS needing to make in this parliament three times the rate of efficiency savings that it’s made over the last 20, 30 years.

“I think that is undeliverable and I think those assumptions need to be urgently reviewed otherwise we’ll see the standards of the NHS gradually decline.”

Asked by Marr whether he was saying Stevens was “strong-armed”, Laws replied: “I am saying that,” before adding: “I’m not criticising Simon, I think he was leant on.”

A spokesman from the NHS refuted the allegations that it was "leant on" and said: “The NHS Five Year Forward View in October 2014 clearly and independently said the NHS would need in the range of £8 billion-£21 billion real terms annual growth by 2020, depending on levels of efficiency, capital investment and transformational funding.

“We stand by this analysis and were not ‘leant on’.

"David Laws was not part of these discussions, and he has no first-hand knowledge of them."