Westminster power vacuum leaves NHS struggling

“The protracted Conservative leadership contest and the ambiguities of Mr Boris Johnson’s regime beyond its Brexit intentions, is producing an overall dispiritedness across Whitehall.  Nowhere is the dismay more apparent than at the Department of Health (BBC – Pym, 2019).  So pre-occupied with navel-gazing have ministers become, that the day job has been put not only on hold but is paralysed, thus leaving NHS leaders in a political void. 

Completely unnoticed within the administrative quagmire of Brexit, NHS bodies are crying out for simple legislative changed to implement its own Long Term Plan.  This initiative, rolled out with much Prime Ministerial fanfare in January, is designed to prevent disease and better integrate care and treatment services when these are most needed.  Yet NHS England is now hamstrung by former legislation that prevents its integration of our fragmented systems of care.  The ‘Lansley’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012 set up botched reforms to improve competition and give scope for more privatisation.  Yet, overall austerity duly strangled these bizarre intentions meaning that ‘co-operation’ rather than ‘competition’ is now the mantra making the health economy work. 

But where are ministers within this inertia?  Well reportedly unavailable, constantly in ‘Make-Up’ – concerned solely with confecting their own political careers – and just too busy ingratiating themselves on their new leader to be bothered. 

Health Secretary Mr Hancock is even accused of trying to bury a long-awaited green paper setting out a host of policies aimed at tackling the causes of ill-health.  He clashed bitterly with Mrs May this week who championed the plan as her last ‘hurrah’ because its measures to tax sugary drinks had been branded by imminent PM Mr Johnson as a ‘sin tax’ he would abolish. 

So what then of Mr Johnson on Health and Social on which he has been strangely silent?  He was overheard in June saying the NHS is a ‘crowning glory’ and that it is ‘not getting the kind of support and indeed the kind of changes and management that it needs’.  While he didn’t say how he would reform it he did say ‘my chum’, Simon Stevens the NHS CEO, helped him get elected president of the Oxford Union as a student, and together they will ‘sort things out’! 

Hence, the NHS is stuck in a stalemate.  Its long-awaited plans on social care suffer repeated delays through Mr Hancock’s own leadership campaign and his new lead role in the Johnson strategy team, let alone his row with the Treasury to set a cap of £100,000 on liability for our care in old age.  But surely the chameleon-like PM will have a big-picture solution rivalling his alleged plan for Formula 1 Motor racing of which he says, ‘Cripe's chaps – let's introduce some pedestrian crossings – that will make it a damn site more exciting’!”