Are Hancock’s health reforms doomed from the start?

Are the Conservatives going to repeat their mistakes of a decade ago on NHS reform? If a week is a long time in politics, perhaps ten years is such a lengthy period that it erases the memory entirely. The current Health and Social Care Bill is due for publication any day now and contains much of the same potential for an almighty political row as the Andrew Lansley reforms of 2011. Senior Whitehall figures and MPs have predicted that Matt Hancock’s new legislation could be ‘Lansley mark ii’, as I write in today’s i paper.

In talking to MPs across the Conservative party, from backbencher to minister, and from lockdown sceptic to restrictions enthusiast, I’ve found members fall into two groups on this reform. The first is those who haven’t paid much attention to what’s being proposed and think it is largely just a tidying up of the Lansley mess. They’re not wrong that the legislation will do this, putting integrated care systems on a statutory footing, and so on, but it does a lot more than that, and this is where the controversy will lie.