Simon Stevens

This article is part of the Health Portal project of Spinwatch.

This article is part of the Revolving Door project of Spinwatch.

Simon Stevens is the CEO of NHS England.

Career

Stevens joined the NHS through it's graduate training scheme in 1988. He has held a number of senior NHS roles in the North East, London and the South Coast.

In 1997 he joined the UK Department of Health as an adviser to secretary of state for health Alan Milburn and Frank Dobson. During his time as secretary of state, Milburn is known for his privatisation reforms and his three aides (including Stevens) have all gone on to work for companies benefitting from the privatisation of the health service. In 2001 he was the health adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. The Financial Times describes Stevens as 'a key architect, along with Mr Milburn and Mr Blair – to whom he went on to serve as health adviser – of the reforms that for the first time broke up the NHS monolith, introducing privately run treatment centres'. He is seen as the author of the NHS Plan in 2000 which set the course towards increased privatisation and market-style reforms.

After leaving government, Stevens joined US healthcare giant UnitedHealth - who he had been in contact with for the previous two years, during which time they landed their first NHS contract. At first Stevens was put on selling UH services to European health systems, he was then appointed vice president and lobbyist for the whole UH Group. Stevens saw subsequently appointed president of its global health division and led health services in the United States, Europe, Brazil, India, China, Africa and the Middle East. As president he was reportedly pocketing a £150,000 salary.

On Steven's time at UH, John Lister says:

'Not surprisingly UH did not even bothered trying to replicate its role in private health insurance, which is a mainstay of its highly profitable US parent company – whose annual turnover is almost £16 billion. The existence of the NHS with its universal health cover has left private medical insurance as a relatively marginal activity in the UK, covering just 12 per cent of the population.

'Instead, like a shark scenting fresh blood, UHE, steered by Stevens and by its chief executive, former British Medical Journal editor, Richard Smith, has zeroed in on much bigger prey – the juicy prospect of controlling hundreds of millions of pounds in the commissioning budgets of primary care trusts. The possibility of opening up this vast source of income for companies such as UHE was created by New Labour’s determined efforts to establish market-style competition in the health service – as proposed by Simon Stevens.'

Stevens returned to the UK in 2014 as CEO of the NHS, and is the man currently running the show.

In 2014 Stevens was ranked by the Health Service Journal as the most powerful person in healthcare.

Milburn's aides

The corporate capture of the NHS

Between 1997 and 2000 Stevens was one of the then secretary of state for health Alan Milburn's aides, with Andrew Harrison and Tony Sampson. In 2004 Stevens moved to America and spent a decade working for UnitedHealth eventually becoming vice president of the UH Group, he then moved back to the UK in 2014 as the CEO of the NHS. In 2005 Sampson was UnitedHealth's chief lobbyist in the UK and Harrison's current employers, Hanover Communications, have 'lobbied for UnitedHealth since at least 2007'.

In early 2015 UnitedHealth were bidding on a number of NHS privatised contracts.

Education

• University of Oxford
• Strathclyde University
• Columbia University

Affiliations

• King's Fund

Resources

See: The Corporate Capture of the NHS

• Tamasin Cave, The privatising cabal at the heart of our NHS Spinwatch, 1 April 2015.