NHS England Update

Danny Beales Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

And my friends at DCMS with their considerable spending power. No, I will stick with the Treasury in my order of favourites, thank you very much. I know where my bread is buttered.

To return to the point made by the right hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen), I thank Dame Jenny Harries for her leadership of UKHSA. We are recruiting for an outstanding replacement and successor, and that is an opportunity to look in the wider context at some of the first principles. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the specific, traditional Porton Down versus Harlow decision, which has been running around the system so long that is now used in a case study for senior civil servant recruitment. The worst decision is indecision. It has plagued us for too long and I hope we can soon report back to the House with a decision on that for everyone’s benefit.

[Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)]

I welcome the statement today from the Secretary of State. Clearly, there is massive duplication of functions across the many regulatory, national, local and regional NHS bodies and huge room for efficiency.

I want to press the Secretary of State on two points. First, will he assure me that the bonfire of bureaucracy will not stop effective local management of NHS trusts and community settings, as IPPR has found that locally the NHS is poorly and under-managed and clinical staff are backfilling admin and management roles? Secondly, as he mentioned, the roll-out of digital technology has been far too slow, with NHS Digital’s move into NHS England not directing change fast enough, so how will the change ensure that the Department of Health and Social Care grips the digital roll-out, accelerates it and ensures the proper integration of NHS digital functions?

[Wes Streeting]

That is a great question from my hon. Friend. We have to give people the tools to do the job. The Prime Minister set me and my hon. Friends in the Department an enormous challenge on behalf of the public. In turn, I am setting an enormous challenge for NHS leaders at every level, but particularly for frontline NHS leaders. We have to give them the tools to do the job in terms of data platforms and the technology that they are given to work with, ensuring that they have access not just to cutting-edge treatments and medical technology, but to the back-office productivity support that can drive efficiency and improvement and, frankly, liberate managers and frontline staff from the arcane systems they are working with.

Some of the very best people I have met in the last few years, shadowing this portfolio and now holding it in government, are NHS leaders, especially on the frontline. It is my responsibility to give them the tools to do the job. That is not just about financial resources; it means bulldozing through some of the regulatory barriers and overcentralised instructions that stop them making decisions in the best interests of patients, in terms of clinical pathways and value for taxpayers. I have given them an undertaking that I will have their backs, both on the decisions that they will have to take on the frontline and on bulldozing through the national bureaucracy that is tying them up in knots when we need to set them free.