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…