Section:GDN 1N PaGe:33 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 12:44 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Wednesday 24 July 2019 The Guardian •33Opinion
Denis CampbellWho’s Matt Hancock?
The health secretary’s
only legacy will be how
quickly he’s forgotten
I
have never seen such an empty vessel as a cabinet
minister”. This is one NHS chief executive’s verdict
on Matt Hancock’s stint as health and social care
secretary. It is a harsh judgment, but it refl ects
a widespread view among NHS bosses that if
Boris Johnson’s imminent formation of his fi rst
government leads to Hancock leaving for another job, few
will miss him. Whether he stays or leaves, history will
judge his fi rst, possibly only, year running the Department
of Health and Social Care (DHSC) as an irrelevance.
Hancock is neither liked nor respected by those
running NHS trusts. They disliked Andrew Lansley and
hated his health and social care bill, but acknowledged
his deep thinking about the health service and intense
preparation for being the health secretary. They had
misgivings about Jeremy Hunt for his alienation of staff
in pursuit of the government’s ambition of a “ seven-day
NHS ”, but belatedly respected him for ending the NHS’s
austerity funding.
But Hancock? Privately NHS leaders are highly critical.
“He’s very arrogant. It’s all about
his own career,” said one. There is a
widespread perception that he has
taken the ministerial tendency to
chase headlines to unprecedented
heights, while showing no deep
interest in many key areas of
challenge. However, his suggestion
during the Tory leadership race
of unrestricted entry for overseas
doctors and nurses was the sort
of bold idea needed if the NHS
workforce crisis is to be overcome.
“For him, it’s all about promoting
himself and using it as a stepping stone to his next job,”
said another NHS chief. There are suggestions that some
of Hancock’s own civil servants share these concerns.
Soon after succeeding Hunt on 10 July last year
Hancock identifi ed his three key NHS priorities as
understaffi ng; the prevention of ill-health; and much
greater adoption of technology. So, against his self-
defi ned targets, what has he actually done?
A year on, the NHS’s gravest challenge – its lack of staff
and the impact that is having on services – remains as
serious as ever. The Interim NHS People Plan , published
last month, failed to make the radical changes needed
to immigration policy , medical training , funding Health
Education England properly, restoring bursaries for nurses
and allied health professionals, how staff are treated and
so on. His promised green paper on prevention of ill-
health , setting out government plans to confront the huge
avoidable loss of life from bad diet, smoking and alcohol,
was fi nally published without fanfare on the gov.uk
website on Monday night. Meanwhile, the green paper on
social care remains as illusory as ever.
Tech is the only area in which he’s made a mark.
His evangelical zeal has forced the NHS to do more
to use it to improve care and reduce the workload of
hard-pressed staff. Trust bosses have tired of showing
Hancock around and explaining a problem, only for
him to respond: “There’s an app that should help fi x
that.” The NHS England chief executive tapped into
that astonishment when, to loud laughter, he asked
at a public event last week: “ Alexa ... where is Matt
Hancock’s social care green paper? There’s no answer.”
If Hancock departs the DHSC this week for the bigger
job he clearly craves, how will he be remembered? He
will be forgotten.Denis Campbell is the Guardian’s health editor‘Tech is the one area
in which he’s made a
mark. His evangelical
zeal has forced the NHS
to do more to use it
to improve care’Interview
‘My team
of experts
knew how
to get off the
naughty step’
David BrindleW
hen Ofsted
inspectors
branded
children’s
services in
Tower Hamlets
“inadequate” two years ago , Debbie
Jones seemed hoist by her own
petard. She had become director
responsible for services at the then
troubled east London council after
leaving Ofsted, where she had
controversially made the inspection
model much tougher.
Jones, 69, can now claim
vindication: having stood her
ground in the face of that damning
verdict, and having been backed
by the council’s leaders, her two-
year turnaround of her department
resulted this week in a “good”
Ofsted rating and a glowing report
describing the achievement as
“remarkable”.
When she arrived at Tower
Hamlets in 2015, initially as an
interim appointee, the council’s
new mayor, John Biggs, was
rebuilding the authority’s credibility
after scandals that resulted
in the government sending in
commissioners to take over core
functions.
Jones soon began to uncover poorpractice. “When you started to look,
the worms came out in multitudes,”
she recalls. “If you look back at the
statistics, we were very proud of the
fact that we kept kids out of care and
we had good preventative services
in place. But we were not taking into
care the children we should have
been. It was a very inward-looking
authority.”
When Ofsted delivered its
“inadequate” rating, she admits it
still came as a “huge shock”. But
she won the agreement of Biggs and
Tower Hamlets’ chief executive Will
Tuckley to carry out a 24-month
programme. The council had already
committed an additional £4.8m
a year for children’s services, but
now put about the same again into a
short-term “improvement pot” and
set up an improvement oversight
board chaired by Sir Alan Wood,
who had r evamped services in
neighbouring Hackney.
“We stripped everything – and I
mean everything – back to basics,”
says Jones. “I had an exceptionally
good interim team: they were
experts, they were rottweilers, they
were experienced in work with other
authorities that had been on the
naughty step.”
The council’s existing child
protection model was ditched in
favour of the acclaimed Leeds model
of early engagement with families in
crisis. Many existing staff left: at one
stage of the transformation process,
temporary agency workers were
fi lling 78% of public-facing roles.
Use of agency staff is now greatly
reduced, if not eliminated, and the
workforce is much more settled.
Turnover of social workers fell from
33% in June last year to below 9%▲ Debbie Jones ditched Tower
Hamlets’ previous child protection
model and transformed the service
PHOTOGRAPH: SARAH LEE/GUARDIANDebbie Jones, children’s
services director at
Tower Hamlets, on a
‘remarkable’ turnaroundClare in the community Harry Venning
this May – about half the London-
wide rate – and Ofsted found morale
high. “Staff want to work in Tower
Hamlets and many agency staff are
converting to permanent contracts,”
it reports. This, Jones points out,
includes the entire emergency
duty team.
What now? With the pot of
improvement money coming to
an end later this year, Jones – who
shows no sign of slowing down
despite being at an age when most
of her peers are enjoying the fruits
of their careers in retirement – is
starting the process of negotiating
what she calls a “realistic” budget
for 2020-21. This will need to
account for the borough’s booming
population , its high poverty rate and
for spiralling demand for special
needs and disability support.
She will also be budgeting for
the costs of dealing with teenagers
caught up in gang culture and
knife crime, sometimes needing to
move them or their families out of
the area. Together with so-called
jihadi brides , it’s an issue that has
put Tower Hamlets regularly in
the news.
“We’re always on the front pages,
often for things we don’t want to be
but increasingly for the good stuff ,”
says Jones.
She still shows all the appetite for
the job, and the ideas and energy of
someone decades younger. Jones
says: “Being a director of children’s
services has always been the love of
my life.”РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS