The NHS reformers must now prove their case (16 June 2025)

Summary

To visit the 2025 NHS ConfedExpo was like attending the kind of music festival which seeks to celebrate a previous decade – in this case, the first of this century, writes Alastair McLellan in this HSJ article.

The return to the “noughties” theme was picked up by almost all the keynote speakers in Manchester – many of course who were already active in the New Labour years.

NHS England CEO Sir Jim Mackey remembered the “great time” he and others had enjoyed in early years of the foundation trust rollout.

Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting also hymned FTs, and even announced the revival of that late-noughties addition, the trust failure regime.

Elsewhere, there was talk of the return of commissioning – the proper full fat primary care trust version designed to change things by shifting where the money is spent, not the non-event of clinical commissioning or the aborted experiment of system working.

But how much substance was there behind this harking back to the NHS’s golden decade?