Tory peer who supervised Covid fiascos could be next NHS chief
THE Tory peer in charge of the failing test-and-trace system could be promoted to head of the NHS in England, it was reported yesterday.
Dido Harding, who has presided over a series of Covid fiascos, is being tipped to replace Simon Stevens next year.
Sir Simon has been chief executive since 2014 but is poised to step down in the spring for a different job in the public sector.
Baroness Harding, 53, is said to be the early favourite to succeed him despite lacking a background in health.
She spent most of her career in business and was chief executive of TalkTalk when data linked to 157,000 customers was accessed by hackers. She left the telecoms firm in 2017 and was made chairman of NHS Improvement before taking over at NHS Test and Trace in May. Since then, she has been accused of sitting on a ‘chaotic disaster’ amid a shortage of Covid tests.
Baroness Harding is also interim chief of Public Health England’s successor, the National Institute for Health Protection.
A senior NHS source told the Sunday Times: ‘Rumours of Simon Stevens’ imminent demise have been circulating for at least two years and they haven’t come true yet, so one should be cautious about being too definitive.
‘However, the way that we would describe it is that these jobs tend to have a defined amount of runway and Simon seems, to most senior people in the NHS, to be on the final stretch of his particular runway.
‘It would therefore not surprise us if this winter proved to be the last in his current position.’
Sir Simon, 54, has been friends with Boris Johnson since university, helping secure the PM’s election as president of the Oxford Union. He served as an adviser to Tony Blair’s government before being promoted to run the NHS by David Cameron.