Labour are set to bring back Sir Tony Blair’s health secretary Alan Milburn to help reform the NHS, in a sign that the private sector and consumer choice will be at the heart of their plans.
It comes after the Prime Minister said in his first press conference that the NHS was “broken”.
Mr Milburn’s exact role is yet to be decided, and talks are still ongoing, but it is understood that he has already been advising the Health Secretary Wes Streeting and his team in recent weeks to ensure they can “hit the ground running” upon entering government.
He was one of the major reforming figures of the Blair years and instigated far-reaching changes in the NHS. During his time as health secretary from 1999 to 2003, Mr Milburn, who was seen as an ally of Sir Tony against Gordon Brown, introduced greater consumer choice for patients and a more prominent role for the private sector within the health service.
On Saturday night Sir Keir Starmer made a series of new government appointments, including Douglas Alexander as a business minister and Jacqui Smith as an education minister.
Both were leading figures in the Blair and Brown years but have been out of politics for a number of years until now.
Mr Alexander was an MP from 1997 until 2015, and was re-elected this week as the MP for Lothian East. Meanwhile Ms Smith, who lost her seat in 2010, has been made a peer.
Other appointments include Ellie Reeves, the sister of Chancellor Rachel Reeves, as a Cabinet minister, Dan Jarvis as a home office minister, and Jim McMahon and Matthew Pennycook as housing ministers.
Mr Milburn’s appointment comes as Labour appears to be planning significant changes to the health service.
A Labour source said: “In opposition, he has been incredibly helpful to Wes and his team to make sure we are ready to hit the ground running. Particularly in the last six weeks, he has been working really closely with the team on a daily basis to make sure we have the plans in place to hit the ground running.
“Alan brings the insight and the knowledge of what made the biggest difference last time Labour was in office – the courage to make the really big reforms to the health service.
“It was the reforms on transparency, choice, and use of the private sector that delivered the goods on cutting waiting lists and making the NHS sustainable for the long term.
“The NHS can’t just keep demanding a heavier and higher price from the taxpayer without modernising the way it works.”
There has been speculation that Mr Milburn could be appointed as a new NHS chairman, to replace Tory appointee Richard Meddings, or made a peer and then appointed as a minister in the Department of Health but Labour has ruled out both these options.
It comes as on Saturday, Sir Keir used his first press conference as Prime Minister to declare that the NHS was “broken”.
He was echoing the words of Mr Streeting, who just hours after his appointment on Friday said that the policy of his department is that the NHS is “broken”.
The Prime Minister also said the same of the prison system and vowed to “deal with the problem” of overcrowding.
Elsewhere in the press conference, Sir Keir said the Rwanda scheme was “dead and buried”.
He said that the policy to send illegal immigrants to the East African nation had acted “almost the opposite” to a deterrent and repeated previous criticisms of the scheme as being a “gimmick”.
The new Prime Minister also revealed that he has told civil servants that they do not have to refer to him by his new title and that he would be “perfectly happy” to be called Keir.
He appeared to echo the words of Sir Tony in his first press conference following his election victory, adding that being called by his first name “felt most natural to me”.
During his first Cabinet meeting on Saturday, Sir Keir said his Government would focus on its key missions to boost economic growth, deliver clean energy, reform the NHS, crack down on crime and increase opportunities for young people.
Sir Keir is about to embark on a tour of the UK’s three devolved nations, visiting Scotland on Sunday followed by Northern Ireland and Wales on Monday.
On Tuesday he will meet with mayors from across the country, before jetting off to Washington DC for a summit marking the 75th anniversary of Nato.
Sir Keir revealed on Saturday that his family had not yet moved into Downing Street but would be moving in “soon”.
He said that he and his wife, Victoria, and his two children were “not quite unpacked yet” and that they would be moving in after his trip to the Nato summit.
At the start of the election campaign, Sir Keir insisted that he was not a Blair “copycat” at the launch of his New Labour-style pledge card designed to appeal to centrist voters.
At the event, Sir Keir said: “The first thing I would say about Tony Blair, which is more important than whether he took his tie off, is he won three elections in a row.
“And what Blair did in 1997 is what [Harold] Wilson did in 1964 and [Clement] Attlee did in 1945 which was to take the Labour Party from opposition into power. And the thing that unites them was the ability to glimpse the future and to persuade people to go on that journey to a changed future.”
Sir Keir joked about how people often try to compare him to Labour leaders of the past, saying that he did not have a secret tattoo of any of them and was his own man.
Clashes with Brown
During his time as health secretary, Mr Milburn clashed with the then chancellor Mr Brown in 2002 over plans to create Foundation Hospitals.
The following year, Mr Milburn abruptly left the Cabinet saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. However, he returned amid much controversy 15 months later when Sir Tony put him in charge of Labour’s general strategy in place of Mr Brown, to the fury of the then chancellor.
Mr Milburn left the Cabinet a second time after the general election in 2005 and since then has been seen as a Blairite “outrider” pushing for policies offering consumers more freedom of choice, particularly in education, health and transport.
‘Streeting a first-class health secretary’
Speaking at a count in Northumberland earlier this week Mr Milburn praised Mr Streeting as a “first-class” health secretary.
He said that the “starting point” for the NHS was to “acknowledge how bad it is”, adding: “I have been around health policy for 30 years, and it has never been as bad as it is now.
“The state of the system, not just hospitals, is awful. There are 7.5 million people on waiting lists, massive staff shortages – you name it.
“It will be about how we reform the system. When we made progress in the early 2000s, we had very high waiting lists and it was the reforms that made the difference.”
Sir Keir was also asked during the press conference if he would be willing to raise taxes to fund public services. He said: “In relation to the tough decisions, we’re going to have to take them and take them early. And we will do that with a raw honesty.
“But that is not a sort of prelude to saying there’s some tax decision that we didn’t speak about before that we’re going to announce now.
“It’s about the tough decisions to fix the problem and being honest about what they are.”
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