As Guido revealed yesterday, the three organisations which received funding from NHS England’s ‘Health as a Social Movement’ programme all just happened to be headed by senior New Labour SpAds. The NEF’s then CEO Marc Stears was Ed Miliband’s speechwriter, while the RSA and Nesta’s CEOs – Matthew Taylor and Geoff Mulgan – were both policy chiefs in Downing Street under Tony Blair. Guido is still investigating exactly how much they all got, unlike the NEF who’ve publicly documented their half-a-million pounds, Nesta and the RSA haven’t published detailed income breakdowns…

Of course there was another top Blair SpAd who was in Downing Street at the same time as Taylor and Mulgan – the “architect of Labour’s health service reforms” according to The Guardian – Simon Stevens. Now the chief executive of NHS England…

The ‘Health as a Social Movement’ programme itself was Stevens’ brainchild as part of his five-year plan for the NHS in 2014. Stevens has certainly maintained a good working relationship with his former colleagues in their new roles, he’s a regular fixture at speaking events for Nesta and gets frequent mentions on the RSA blog. Taylor is particularly fond of talking up “my former Downing Street colleague”.

Just after Stevens launched his five-year plan, Taylor was quick to praise it in a blog titled “Joining Up Is Hard To Do”, where none other than Geoff Mulgan gets name-dropped in the second paragraph for his work promoting “more integrated working”. A year later and they’d both won the contracts from Stevens’ new scheme. Looks like joining up wasn’t so hard to do after all!

As Guido revealed yesterday, hard-left Tory-bashing think tank New Economics Foundation have curiously been the recipient of over £500,000 of funding from NHS England over the past three years. Now Guido can shed some more light how a load of funding ended up with a bunch of strident lefties rather than needful patients…

It turns out the New Economics Foundation were one of three organisations which awarded funding as part of the NHS England’s “Health as a Social Movement” programme which began in 2016, along with the RSA and Nesta. It just so happens that the CEOs of all three organisations at the time had something in common…

• Matthew Taylor, CEO of the RSA. Head of No.10 Policy Unit under Tony Blair
• Geoff Mulgan, CEO of Nesta. Director of Policy under Tony Blair
• Marc Stears, CEO of the NEF until 2017. Former speechwriter (and university flatmate) of Ed Miliband
  

Small world!

NHS England say:

“Following an open competitive process five years ago, three organisations were commissioned to help the NHS and its partners find ways to bring communities together to improve the health of local people through projects which tackled loneliness, improved cancer care and the quality of life of dementia patients, amongst others.”

The NHS insist that they were not simply giving the money to the NEF, it was as part of work they outsourced following a competitive tendering process. Which sounds a lot like NHS privatisation, funny how the NEF don’t seem to have such a problem with it when they’re the beneficiaries…

The NHS didn’t respond to Guido’s question of whether they foresaw any potential issues with appointing a highly politicised and partisan think tank with economics views well outside the mainstream. No doubt they’ll be evening out the balance by picking the IEA or the TPA for their next ‘social health’ privatisation partnership programme…

Marc Stears, Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of University College, Oxford, is not merely an old university friend of the Labour leader, he is one of Ed’s closest advisers and his chief speech-writer. More importantly he is the co-author of the Labour manifesto.

In 2012 Stears wrote approvingly in the New Statesman about an IPPR report calling on the left to favour letting housing association tenants have a right-to-buy:

The stable patterns of social interaction that are associated with communities of ownership are preconditions for the kind of social reciprocity that the left champions, as well as the more conservative disposition that is more usually commented upon. There is, in other words, a social argument for ownership…

 An argument being made by the author of the Labour Party manifesto, for a policy appearing in Conservative Party Manifesto… 

Last night however the knee-jerk Labour twitterati collectively lost it when they heard of the Conservative manifesto commitment to introduce a right-to-buy for housing association tenants. Atul Hatwal, editor of Labour Uncut, was a lone Labour voice of sanity:

Labour Twitter tonight, at it again, self-harming, this time on right to buy. Yes, more build needed, but for many RTB is abt aspiration

— Atul Hatwal (@atulh) April 13, 2015

It could have been so different, the policy could have been a Labour manifesto commitment if only they had taken up the recommendation from the Labour aligned IPPR think-tank:

The report recommended:

Extending the rights to buy, acquire and manage to all housing association homes, levelling the playing field in terms of opportunities for ownership and control in social housing… 

… there are currently over a million housing association properties which cannot be bought by their tenants through the right to buy or right to acquire (Davis and Field 2012), and the right to manage does not apply to housing association homes. Notwithstanding the legal, logistical and administrative challenges entailed, the rights to buy and acquire (with the discount rate sensibly capped) and the right to manage should be extended to all housing association homes

The authors were not wild-eyed wonks, they were Andy Hull and Graeme Cooke. Hull is a councillor in Islington and the Cabinet Member for Finance and Performance and since leaving IPPR now works for Owen Jones’ left-wing Class think tank. Cooke used to be a SpAd when Labour were in government and still works for IPPR (helping to write the Condition of Britain report which inspired a lot of the Labour manifesto).

Labour tweeters attacking the Tories for putting this policy in their manifesto should know that comrades Hull and Cooke recommended this policy as a way to improve housing. Alan Milburn and Frank Field also called for the right-to-buy years ago. No doubt the Labour twitterati will say these are all irredeemable Blairites (they’re not), therefore apostate. Marc Stears however is Ed Miliband’s left-hand man and he too supports the right-to-buy for housing association tenants.