Jeremy Hunt needs to target transparency for the NHS

The Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt must be given some credit for agreeing last week to talk to the representatives of junior doctors, thus averting a damaging strike in the NHS. However, the decision to suppress vital information about NHS performance is an ominous development.

On the day last week when the House of Commons was debating air strikes in Syria, Mr Hunt sneaked out an announcement that NHS England was discontinuing weekly updates of a number of indicators including accident and emergency waiting times, ambulance delays outside hospitals and cancelled operations. This is the classic Soviet response to missed targets: change the figures.

Last month, the NHS missed five crucial targets: for A&E waiting times (missed for 12 of the past 13 months), for ambulance response times (for the fourth month in a row), for cancer treatment, for diagnostic tests and for the 111 telephone service. The point of targets is to hold service providers to account, to identify problems and to put them right.

They are a testing discipline, which is why some doctors objected to them when they were brought in by the Labour government. In opposition, the Conservatives sought to court favour with NHS staff by echoing the doctors’ complaint that “top-down” targets “distorted clinical priorities”. In government, the Conservatives – and most doctors – accepted that targets were needed to hold the NHS to the mark, let alone to secure improvements.

The decision to publish less information may not be Mr Hunt’s directly: the NHS now operates at one remove from ministers. But the principle of openness is his responsibility. He may want to minimise bad news stories about the NHS over the winter. If so, this is short-sighted in the extreme. Refusing to publish the figures does not make the bad news go away. It just makes it harder to do anything about it. But if Mr Hunt’s secondary hope is to try to ingratiate himself with the conservative element among doctors, that would be an even more serious mistake.

Mr Hunt should never have got himself into a position where he united the junior doctors against him – to such an extent that there was a 98 per cent vote for strike action. But the way out now is not to abandon the effort to manage the NHS better – which is bound to mean some changes to junior doctors’ working practices. Instead, he should recognise that junior doctors are not the obstacle to reform, while inviting them to help him to achieve the changes that everyone wants. To do so, however, we need more information about the performance of the NHS, not less. The political pressure from the publication of weekly figures is one of the incentives on all parts of the health service to produce better outcomes.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is quite right to take up the question. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday, he accuses Mr Hunt of “launching an NHS news blackout”. Important as the Syria vote was last week, it is essential that the Opposition holds the Government to account for its domestic policy. The parlous state of the health service is likely to be one of the most pressing problems of the next few years. In last month’s Autumn Statement, the Chancellor provided the minimum resources to make it possible to keep the NHS on an even keel for the next five years. But to do so will require a fair settlement of the junior doctors’ dispute and a continuous effort to reform the service – a balance that will test Mr Hunt’s political skills to the limit.

The Health Secretary has to deal with that problem with openness, dialogue and co-operation. Censoring inconvenient information is never a good plan.