It is a room that has housed three occupants in the past four years, leading some Westminster insiders to label health work as a poisoned chalice. Mr Barclay does not appear to be daunted by that record, nor does he show any inclination to act as a caretaker minister until the next prime minister is crowned on September 5. He insists there is no time to sit on our hands given the “serious challenges” the NHS will face this winter from seasonal flu, Covid and the impact of the cost of living crisis. His plan to help the agency over the winter is to “significantly increase” overseas recruitment of social workers, which he readily admits carries “political risk”. But he is adamant that unless decisive action is taken now, before the Tory leadership contest is over, it will be “too late” to save hospitals from a state of emergency.
“More Data Engineers”
Mr Barclay also has ambitious long-term ideas for improving health delivery in what will be seen as a pitch for the next Tory leader to keep him in the job. He is passionate about using technology and data to take the pressure off surgeries and A&E and says it could take away layers of middle-management bureaucracy. “He doesn’t have to do what a GP is asked to do by a doctor,” he says. For example, some routine appointments, such as blood pressure checks, could be made by pharmacists and booked in the NHS app. One of his first actions as Health Secretary was to order a “digital mapping” exercise of the service’s workforce to root out where efficiency savings could be made. “There is significant scope to reduce non-frontline clinical staff by addressing areas of overlap,” he insists. “It’s not just a smaller workforce, but partly a different skill set of the workforce. “In short, more data engineers, software engineers, and fewer people filling out spreadsheets and communicating via email and traditional ways.”
Sunak and Truss on the NHS
I move on to what the two candidates were promising to do to take on Mr Johnson with the NHS if they prevailed in the Tory MPs’ vote. He is more cautious than Ms Truss – who has vowed never to bring back the Covid lockdown – about whether restrictions will be needed again this winter. “We have over 10,000 cases in hospital right now, about a third of those are people in hospital because of Covid,” he warns. “So there’s still a significant number, despite the summer and infections tend to spread more clearly in the winter.” However, he believes the more draconian restrictions, such as closing businesses and ordering people to stay at home, are now a thing of the past. “We have the vaccine program and we have a tremendous amount of knowledge, so we’re in a very different situation than when the restrictions were being looked at.” And about Mr Sunak’s proposal to impose a £10 fine on people who miss medical appointments? “If appointments are missed, it’s important to understand what the cause is and it’s good to shed light on it,” he replies diplomatically. He also expressed sympathy for the Secretary of State’s plan to reverse taxes on junk food and ban buy-one-get-one-free deals. “I think empowering people to make informed decisions is a much better position than dictating to them,” insists Mr Barclay. I leave his office after 7pm, passing a large room outside where banks of civil servants are still in their offices working. The scene is an antidote to the caricature of a “zombie government” that Mr Barclay was so keen to dismantle during the previous half hour. It seems that the Ministry of Health knows that winter is coming and there is no time to waste.
