The NHS is “drinking in the last-chance saloon” and needs to change, the former health secretary Alan Milburn has said as he prepares to take up a senior role in the health department.
Milburn, who brought about radical changes such as the introduction of NHS foundation trusts when he was a minister for Tony Blair, called for “cultural change” in the health service and said “big reforms will be needed to make it fit for the future”.
“People have got to stop thinking that the answer to the NHS problem is simply more and more money,” the former Darlington MP said in a paywalled interview with the Times, adding that the crisis in the NHS was “a million times worse” than when he was in office.
“The NHS is in the worst state I’ve ever seen and I’ve been around health policy now for 30 years. I genuinely think it’s drinking in the last-chance saloon.”
The Guardian revealed in October that Milburn was being given a lead role in the running of Wes Streeting’s health ministry, reigniting the row over Labour figures with private interests having access to the government.
On Saturday, Streeting confirmed Milburn’s appointment as lead non-executive director of the Department of Health, praising him for his previous reforms “which helped deliver the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction in the history of the NHS” and welcoming his “advice on turning the NHS around once again”.
The move comes as the NHS unlocks £22.6bn of extra funding announced in the budget.
“When you put that amount of money in, you better make sure that every pound of it is working to produce better outcomes for patients,” Milburn said, adding that the prime minister, Keir Starmer, agreed with him. “Keir has got religion on public-service reform,” he said.
Streeting would go “further and faster” than New Labour had under Blair, Milburn said, because delivering on the NHS was “the acid test for this government”.
“The NHS has got to be weaned off the ‘more, more, more’ culture, and it’s got to recognise that if you’re going to do big dollops of resources, then that has got to be matched by a massive dose of reform,” he said.
Linking money to reform is “the only game in town, because otherwise in the end what will happen is we’ll end up breaking the NHS on the mantra of ‘it’s always got to be more, more, more’”, he said.
He said there was a “different fiscal climate” now compared with when he was health secretary between 1999 and 2003: “If you’ve broadly got less resourcing than then, you’ve got to do more reforming than then.”
Milburn was an MP between 1992 and 2010. Between 2012 and 2017, he chaired the social mobility commission and since 2015 he has been chancellor of Lancaster University.
Announcing his appointment on Saturday, the Department of Health and Social Care confirmed that “due to the requirements of the role” Milburn was “appointed directly by the secretary of state”.
Streeting said the government had inherited “a broken health service”. Building “an NHS fit for the future” was one of Labour’s five missions laid out in its election manifesto.
The party promised to cut waiting times by offering 40,000 more appointments every week, doubling the number of cancer scanners, employing 8,500 additional mental health staff, forming a new “dentistry rescue” plan and bringing back “the family doctor”.
