We profile the new Secretary of State for Health:
Andrew Lansley – once a high-flying civil servant – became politicised during the Thatcher Government and went on to take up a position as Director of Research in Conservative Central Office during the 1992 General Election, playing a key role in the Conservatives’ Election victory.
We profile the new Secretary of State for Health:
Andrew Lansley – once a high-flying civil servant – became politicised during the Thatcher Government and went on to take up a position as Director of Research in Conservative Central Office during the 1992 General Election, playing a key role in the Conservatives’ Election victory.
Although he now sits towards the left of the Conservative Party – albeit with stridently Eurosceptic views – he has travelled some distance in political terms over the years. He is on the record, in 1995, as stating that the Conservatives should campaign on immigration because it plays, "well in the tabloids and has more potential to hurt [Labour]". In the same article – for The Guardian (3 September 1995) – he also espoused negative campaigning stating that it, "does deliver votes in the endgame".
His journey over the past fifteen years has been significant. Nowadays, Andrew Lansley is fonder of pointing out his family’s strong connections to public services: himself as a civil servant; his brothers as a teacher and a policeman; and his father, who worked as an NHS pathologist. He speaks of transforming the public’s view of the Conservatives’ commitment to the NHS as one of his greatest achievements. Those who have worked closely with him see flashes of the tactical nous for which he was awarded a CBE during the 1992 campaign. The commitment to a Cancer Drugs Fund by the Conservatives during the 2010 campaign was a classic case-in-point: a policy designed to neutralise Labour’s strongest attack, and do so in a way designed to grab the attention of the media.
The intellectual driving force behind the Conservatives’ health policy, Andrew Lansley first set out its foundations in a speech to the NHS Confederation in September 2005 – before David Cameron even became Conservative leader. Very little in policy terms has changed since, although the manifesto commitment to an independent NHS Board is one example.
The Conservatives certainly set out a comprehensive health manifesto, promising to increase NHS resources in real terms in each year of the next Parliament. Andrew Lansley also set out Conservative plans to strengthen GP-led commissioning of local services, to increase patients’ information and control over their care and to scrap top-down targets with a view to cutting bureaucracy within the health service. He has said that doctors should be given an increased role in deciding which drugs to prescribe for their patients, and has called for better deals with manufacturers to reduce prices.
On account of his personal experience of them, Andrew Lansley has a particular interest in improving stroke and spinal injury services, and is likely to be an advocate for improvements in these areas early on in the new Parliament.
In his time as Shadow Secretary of State for Health he earned a reputation for his extensive knowledge of the NHS and health services, and for refusing to ‘shroud-wave’ when individual cases of NHS service failure appear in the press. However, there remains a purely tactical element to Andrew Lansley’s politics. It remains to be seen what changes, if any, we will see to Tory health plans in the hotly anticipated full coalition document, but we can be certain that Lansley’s extensive experience and his attention to detail will ensure that the NHS remains a top priority for the Conservatives.