9: Is it time for another Wanless Review? – with Anita Charlesworth and Nick Macpherson

The Health Foundation podcast

It’s easy to forget the state the NHS was in 20 years ago – long waiting lists, heartrending delays in care, winter crises – and heated debate on whether the NHS model was obsolete.

But the Wanless Review set the NHS on course to receive record catch up funding. So in this episode, we ask, given the pandemic and the mounting challenges facing the NHS to deal with a huge backlog of care, is it time for another Wanless?
Our Chief Executive Dr Jennifer Dixon discusses this with two expert guests and former Treasury officials, who were very close to the original Wanless Review:

• Anita Charlesworth, Director of the Health Foundation’s REAL Centre and our Director of Research. Anita led the secretariat for the original Wanless Review within the Treasury, where she was Director of Public Spending from 1998 to 2007.
• Nick Macpherson, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 2005 to 2016. Nick was Permanent Secretary to three chancellors, and managed the department through the financial and wider economic crisis which began in 2007. Nick joined the House of Lords in 2016 as Baron of Earls Court.

Useful links:

• The most expensive breakfast in history. The Health Foundation, 2021.
• Find out more about the REAL Centre
• Find out more about our podcast

A note on audio quality in this episode

Unfortunately, we were unable to record this episode using our normal recording platform, so the audio quality is lower than we would like. We'll be back recording the podcast in our normal way next episode.