Jeremy Hunt becomes longest serving health secretary in NHS history

No sign of controversies letting up as record-breaking minister charts new territory in the NHS' 70th year

Mr Hunt's title was expanded to include cut-hit social care at the last reshuffle (AFP/Getty)

Jeremy Hunt is now the UK’s longest serving health secretary, as Monday marks five years and 274 days since he took over from Andrew Lansley in the wake of his predecessor’s disastrous NHS reforms.

Mr Hunt has also surpassed the tenure of health service founder, Labour’s Aneurin Bevan, in February. The milestone comes just a month ahead of the NHS' own 70th anniversary.

In 2012 Mr Hunt was quick to turn the debate from the disruption and cost caused by Mr Lansley's reforms and has focused his efforts on championing patient safety.

These early years were a masterclass in detoxifying the issue of the NHS, and he has been behind major reviews of deaths in maternity services and IT-led safety improvements.

However his tenure is also remembered for a period of unprecedented cuts and pay restraints that have increased pressures on staff and seen patient waiting lists balloon.

Labour produced a “timeline of failure” to mark the occasion, on Sunday, as Mr Hunt tied level with previous longest serving incumbent in the post, fellow Conservative MP, Norman Fowler.

It notes that the number of people waiting more than four hours in A&E each month has increased by 842 per cent.

More than 9,000 people waited more than four hours in September 2012, compared to 76,054 in March 2018 – though the March figures were in the middle of what Mr Hunt concedes was the NHS’s “worst ever” winter crisis.

Other notable figures include the NHS waiting list having increased by 1.4 million, and the number of patients waiting more than two weeks for urgent cancer treatment more than doubling to 113,373 in 2017/18.

The 18-week target for patients to be treated after a GP referral has not been hit since 2016 and even extra funding in the autumn statement last year – explicitly to restore waiting time target performance – is unlikely to be enough.

This is largely down eight years of underfunding, where annual increases in the NHS budget averaged around four per cent per year prior to 2010, they have been closer to one per cent under the Conservatives.

Most of these savings have been won through pay freezes for hard working staff, many of who have not had a raise above one per cent since 2010 and have seen earnings fall in real terms.

A deal on pay for nurses, paramedics and other frontline staff could see junior staff’s pay increase as much as a third in coming years, but is currently being voted on by trade unions and could still fail.

Doctors have no such pay deal however, and the health secretary has won no friends in this corner.

In 2016 he pushed the health service to the brink of crisis and the first all-out strikes by medical staff in NHS history as a result of his push for a “seven day NHS”.

The change reclassified junior doctors evenings and weekends as ordinary working hours, minimising overtime entitlements in a bid to allow hospitals to have more doctors working at weekends.

Mr Hunt said this would address an increase in deaths on the weekend and the busy days after, but critics – including the authors of the original “weekend effect study” in the BMJ – have challenged this assumption.

This year might be his trickiest yet.

Recent acknowledgement of the importance of social care, which has been hit even harder than the NHS by Conservative cuts, saw Mr Hunt gain the full title of secretary of state for health and social care.

He is now embroiled in a fight with the Treasury to release funds for a long-term budget uplift for health and social care.

This puts him in the unlikely position of backing tax rises to fund the NHS which are essential if it is to cope with growing patient demand and make the reforms it needs.

But while he is fighting for the NHS on one front he is also defending his own NHS reforms against an on-going legal challenge launched by the late Professor Stephen Hawking, which claims the changes open the door to privatisation.