Sajid Javid’s medicine won’t save the NHS

Does the NHS need a royal commission? Sajid Javid, the former health secretary, thinks so. ‘It is abundantly clear the status quo cannot continue,’ he writes in the Times. He argues that ‘a dispassionate and honest assessment is required’ from an ‘institution that is above the political fray’. Javid suggests that a royal commission that is ‘set up correctly’ could perform this function.

Royal commissions sound august but don’t have a great track record of really helping governments make difficult decisions. They have become a byword in Westminster for kicking something not so much into the long grass as into a thick forest of delay. The Labour government set up one on social care in 1999, and rejected its most important proposals. The NHS has had the royal commission treatment, too: Harold Wilson set one up in the late 1970s to deal with the complaints from the medical world that healthcare was in crisis.