The return of the former vaccine chief is a sign of trouble

The news that Emily Lawson is returning from 10 Downing Street to run the government’s vaccination programme ought to be doubly worrying for Boris Johnson. She is the civil servant who won praise for her management of the successful vaccine rollout this year, and who was appointed to head the new No 10 delivery unit – responsible for chasing up the delivery of the government’s manifesto promises.

It is worrying because it suggests that the campaign to get third, booster, doses to people is not going as quickly as it should – and that plans to vaccinate the 12-15 age group are falling behind expectations.

But it is also worrying because it means that Lawson’s drive and organisation has been diverted from what the prime minister wants to focus on between now and the next election, namely delivering the targets he set himself at the last election.

The No 10 delivery unit is the revival of a successful mechanism used by Tony Blair in his second term to set a small number of rigorous targets that drove public service reform – helping to cut NHS waiting lists, London street crime and rail delays. It was headed by Sir Michael Barber, who was invited by Johnson and Simon Case, the cabinet secretary and head of the home civil service, to advise on reconstituting a similar unit.

No sooner had the new delivery unit started work, however, than its head has been whisked away, loaned to the Department of Health and Social Care to restore a sense of urgency to the vaccines programme. I am told that this makes sense, because vaccines are the most important delivery task facing the government, and that the delivery unit will be able to keep its focus for the couple of months that she is away.

It may be, too, that the work of the renamed Department of Levelling Up, under Michael Gove and his policy-wonk junior minister, Neil O’Brien, is going to be as important as that of the delivery unit in shaping Johnson’s claim at the next election to have levelled up and united the country.

But the next election is probably less than two and a half years away, and Sir Michael’s experience of public service reform under Blair is that it can take that long just to start showing some signs of progress. And the biggest challenge is one that has arisen since the last manifesto was written, namely the huge backlog of health service waiting lists. Johnson and Sajid Javid, the health secretary, cannot afford to lose any more time in expanding the capacity of the NHS.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator