Connecting for Health has been disconnected: and the bill is £35 billion…for nothing.

Did you notice?

The Slog: After nine years of actual and spun cost to the taxpayer – with absolutely no ‘outcome’, to use the contemporary syntax – on March 31st last Connecting for Health (CfH) ceased to exist. Don’t bother looking for any tweets from the Health Secretary about it, because there weren’t any. It was a Sunday, you see…good day to bury a story. Oh, and the start of British ‘Summer’ Time. Look through all the news archives for the day, and you won’t find a single MSM article relating to it. Google ‘Connecting for Health abolished’, and not one MSM title comes up as having covered it at all at any time. They must have done, presumably: perhaps Cameron did a deal with his Google intimates to erase it from history.

We would all do well to think about this sorry episode in the ongoing history of waste caused directly by politician egomania and civil service incompetence. I doubt if this piece will attract many hits….but it ought to, because this isn’t a ‘Save our NHS’ story: it’s an article that asks what exactly is Westminster and Whitehall for – apart from prancing about and frittering away our taxes.

It isn’t meant to be Labour-bashing either: with his ludicrous HS2 rail project that nobody needs or wants, David Cameron too is masturbating with public money. This kind of nonsense is, I’m afraid, wired into the political beast at the factory where they’re all turned out these days.

It’s another piece acting as a prelude to tomorrow’s Saturday Esssay.

I found out CfH doesn’t exist any more last night, because I wanted to order my normal prescription online. Actually, I didn’t want to really – but my Practice has closed down the telephone ordering service. It was more or less Branson’s first move after the takeover last year. Six months later, they still haven’t got round to putting the form on the website as such. So while looking round, I noticed two things: first, the new Branson outfit got 3 stars from patients (the other local practice, still owned by the GPs and funded by the NHS) gets 5 stars; and second, CfH is no more.

Connecting for Health was born on April Fool’s Day 2004. It is thought by some to have been an idea dreamed up by Alistair Campbell with one purpose: to dig Blair out of his Iraq hole with a Weapon of Mass Distraction. Anti-War feeling was on the rise, awkward questions were being asked about how the war decision had been reached, and Gordon Brown was offering Blair a course in acupuncture as a cure. His choice of implement, however, was the Bowie Knife. Had Britian never gone into Iraq, it would never have had CfH. The idea was allegedly given the go-ahead from conception to approval “after a 10 minute briefing during one of his sofa sessions at Number Ten”. One person present told the Telegraph later that Blair had “a Tony moment”. With a wave of his hand, he gave the go-ahead for the biggest public sector IT project the world has ever seen – and easily the biggest IT turkey in history.

But the story starts properly in 2005, when boom and boost had been abolished and the New Paradigm was an Empire to last for a million years. If Ed Balls wants to carry on insisting that “Labour did not spend too much”, then I suggest he reads what follows. It might shut him up: I doubt it, but it might.

What happened in March 2005 was that an NHS scheme closed. This happens about every five years in the Health Service, as each new Minister brings a New Dawn to the table. At that time, the NHS Information Authority was closed, and its staff – no redundancies, mind – folded into another piece of brainless bureaucracy, the National Health Applications and Infrastructure services (NHAIS). Patricia Hewitt came on Board two months later, and rebranded the NHAIS Connecting For Health.

Fifteen months after that, Accenture pulled out of the scheme, as good as saying it was a shambolic crock, and that they wanted to cut their losses. Although this posed embarrassing questions for Patricia Hewcandoitt, she reaffirmed her commitment to CfH, saying “The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose [of Cfh]“. In truth, it was never going to be fit for purpose. A member of my family spent six months at one point seconded to the Leeds-based CfH centre as a software consultant – at huge fee rates and all expenses paid. There were hundreds of others doing the same. It was, he told me at the time, a total disaster.

This was confirmed when in June 2006, Lord Warner, a health minister, announced that the programme was  two years behind schedule, and more than three times over its initial £6.2 billion budget. It would, he told Parliament, approach £20 billion by 2010, its revised delivery date. In a classic piece of Blairite history-revision, the loss to the taxpayer was later set at £12.6bn….but that was and remains a thumping great whopper of a lie. At the time I had a long-time friend and former client in the Treasury, who showed me the full breakdown minus all the shifting off balance sheet mularkey.

Patricia Blewitt was duly fired in 2007, at which point Alan Johnson arrived announcing “£15bn of new money to spend on Health”, which then turned out to be old money recycled to look new. Having demonstrated her huge expertise in IT, however, early in 2008 Hewitt joined the Board of British Telecom as a “software consultant”.

By 2011, the cost had reached £23.6bn (always officially denied) on top of which – but declared elsewhere under another heading divorced from CfH – a further £8.8bn had been spent on consultants and software gurus desperately trying to make sense of the big idea: to connect 300 hospitals to 300,000 Primary Care practices around the UK. If that doesn’t seem like too hard a task, it could be because they were connected already by a long-forgotten invention called the telephone, and its more recent smarter brother, the email. Nobody at the time or since has ever explained why the existing system couldn’t simply have been regularly updated as innovations such as email talk came online and Skype was developed.

Britain could in fact have incurred zero investment, only a running cost, by doing that. Medical think-tank The Kings Fund recently published a lengthy paper about NHS integration in which the ideas of CfH got barely a mention. As it is, the system remains unchanged, but the CfH White Mammoth clocked up a staggering bill close to £35billion. It was a complete and utter waste – a disgraceful case history of incompetent commissioning and awful budgetary control by Whitehall, and hubris-fuelled lies from every politician involved in it.

Having registered that point about why this happened – or rather didn’t happen – although over 95% of it was on Labour’s watch, the Kings Fund points out that the shambolic approaches of first Lansley and then Jeremy Hunt are inreasingly likely to make it necessary because of the “added complications” involved in their primary care reforms. It also points out – backing a long-term hobby-horse of this site – that given the increased complexity of modern hardware and the past “inability of GPs to compete with hospitals”, it does seem somewhat barmy to give hospital Trusts far less of a budget than GPs get. But we all know what lies behind that nonsense, so there’s no longer much point banging on about it.

The underlying point here is a very simple one: over many decades, the NHS has become a football of spendthrift politicians, and a byword for amateurish commissioning by the Civil Service. There is no doubt in my mind that localising and mutualising the service is by far the best solution for UK citizens. But what the citizens want is never going to on offer as long as (a) the NHS is a State responsibility or (b) it is stealthily privatised into an insurance model….which, it is obvious, simply wouldn’t be feasible in terms of proper healthcare for the vast majority of Britons.

As I keep promising, a more general view on this will be available here tomorrow.

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