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Matt Hancock was the headline act at yesterday’s covid inquiry, catching media attention with claims Whitehall’s pre-pandemic planning was “completely wrong”.

But away from the main stage, ex-Public Health England boss Duncan Selbie also had a score to settle.

The now-moustachioed former CEO took the opportunity to highlight the repeated cuts to prevention spending in the years running up to the pandemic.

Mr Selbie told the inquiry the Treasury had insisted on deep cuts to PHE’s budget in exchange for higher NHS spending.

This was an accounting wheeze that allowed Cameron and Osborne to claim the NHS budget was protected – even as areas like training, capital and prevention, which were outside NHS England’s control, were squeezed.

At one point Mr Hunt demanded PHE cut its budget by 50 per cent “in order to fund the NHS”, the witness claimed. Though this did not transpire, the Treasury still insisted on real-terms cuts. “It was just depressing,” Mr Selbie said of the situation.

The comments were a remarkable change of mind for Mr Selbie, who in 2015 described a £200m cut to public health as a “reasonable ask” and went on to claim it was “intellectually inadequate” to suggest it was being undervalued.

Morale-boosting mission

Gloucester Hospitals’ new CEO has a mammoth task on his hands. Kevin McNamara, who joins from Great Western Hospitals, will lead a trust where staff morale is among the lowest in the country.

The percentage of staff recommending the trust as a place to work dropped to just 43 per cent in 2022.

On top of this, the trust saw one of the biggest drops between 2019 and 2022, falling a whopping 17 percentage points.

The trust, along with others in the South West, has particularly faced problems with ambulance handover delays.

In 2022 departing CEO Deborah Lee, who stands down after seven years at the helm, revealed her husband drove her to accident and emergency when she had a stroke as he feared an ambulance would take too long.

She said: “I can’t get one thing out of my head. What if my husband hadn’t been there and my daughter had called for an ambulance and I’d been put in the Cat 2 ‘stack’?”

The incoming CEO said the “hard work” to turn things around had already begun, with an ambitious programme of cultural and operational improvement under way.

Also on hsj.co.uk today

In Recovery Watch, James Illman looks at the specialties with the most challenging backlogs, and Sir Julian Hartley, chief executive of NHS Providers, says the first year of integrated care systems has been fraught with challenges but these fledgling organisations have great potential.