‘Complacent’ health chiefs in England lack drive to transform NHS, say MPs

Plans to radically reform the health service are at risk because senior leaders of both NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) are “complacent” and lack dynamism, MPs have said.

In a report the public accounts committee (PAC) warns that officials in England have neither the ideas nor the drive to implement the health service transformation required by Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting.

The influential cross-party Commons committee did not identify individuals by name. But it reached its conclusions after questioning in November five top-level civil servants including Amanda Pritchard, NHS England’s chief executive, and Sir Chris Wormald, the DHSC’s then permanent secretary, who has since become the new cabinet secretary.

“The scale of government’s ambitions is great but senior officials do not seem to have ideas, or the drive, to match the level of change required, despite this being precisely the moment where such thinking is vital,” the PAC said in its report on the health service’s financial sustainability.

Their lack of energy and urgency risks wasting “a golden opportunity” to modernise how the NHS works and thus improve the country’s health, the MPs said.

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Source: The Guardian, 29 January 2025