Simon Stevens

Stevens was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to the NHS.

As the NHS England CEO, he is directly accountable to Parliament for management of £120 billion of annual NHS funding. He frequently gives evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee, and other Parliamentary committees. He has used the statutory independence of NHS England to speak openly about NHS funding and reform. In January 2019 he welcomed new figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that NHS productivity in England has been rising at 3%, treble the performance of the overall UK economy.

Stevens has drawn attention to online sources of misinformation about vaccine safety. He has noted that "although nine in ten parents say they support vaccination half of them say that they have seen fake messages around vaccination on social media," and "if parents are being told that their children shouldn’t be vaccinated, it’s as irresponsible as saying 'don’t tell your children to look both ways before they cross the road on the way to school". He called on social media sites to take action against misleading and untrue health claims. Both Instagram and Facebook subsequently agreed to do so.

On 7 January 2019 Stevens launched the NHS Long Term Plan, drawn up with patient groups and NHS clinicians. It set out how the NHS will use its extra funding to redesign care and improve outcomes over the decade ahead. The Prime Minister spoke at the launch giving government backing to the plan.

In drawing up the NHS Long Term Plan, NHS England was also asked by the cross-party House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee, and by the Prime Minister, to make recommendations on possible changes to health legislation. Stevens came forward with proposals to substantially amend the government’s previous 2012 legislation. A wide range of stakeholders called for an NHS Long Term Plan including the Age UK, Macmillan Cancer, the British Red Cross, RCN, Unison, the Medical Royal Colleges, the Kings Fund, NHS Providers, the NHS Confederation, the Local Government Association, Alzheimers Society, British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK, the Stroke Association and the Patients Association. This letter specifically called for the removal of Section 75 of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. The new government of Boris Johnson announced in the Queens Speech of 14 October 2019 that it would back the Long Term Plan, legislate for the £20.5 billion real terms funding increase, and introduce legislation to give effect to the NHS's recommended legal changes.

Stevens led action to stop NHS funding of homeopathy, on the grounds that "There is no robust evidence to support homeopathy, which is at best a placebo and a misuse of scarce NHS funds." NHS England was then sued by the British Homeopathic Association who argued that Stevens’ criticisms, including on the BBC Radio Today programme, prejudged its public consultation. The High Court dismissed the BHA challenge, and backed NHS England.

Stevens has championed giving local communities more control over national budgets, including stronger 'Devo Manc' regional powers for Greater Manchester. He has argued for the importance of social care. In October 2018 he pledged up to £50 million for extra NHS support for the community affected by the Grenfell Tower fire. The Local Government Chronicle ranked him the most powerful figure in local government.

In June 2018 – just ahead of the NHS' 70th Anniversary – the Prime Minister Theresa May announced extra funding for the NHS worth an average real terms increase of 3.4% a year, reaching £20.5 billion extra in 2023/24.

Stevens led the NHS' 70th anniversary celebrations, including giving the address on 5 July 2018 in the national service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey.

Stevens has actively promoted genomics, and cell and gene therapies on the NHS. In Autumn 2018 he announced that the NHS had become the first health service in Europe to negotiate approvals for newly licensed breakthrough CAR-T cancer therapies.

Stevens has argued that "One of the problems with NHS funding over the last 70 years has been its volatility. So, we bounce off the banks between boom and bust and that makes it very hard to plan services." In November 2017 Stevens gave a high profile speech making the case for a return to NHS funding increases in line with historic norms and independently assessed requirements. He did so against the backdrop of a Vote Leave poster which had promised £350 million a week for the health service and which, he said, the "public want to see honoured". His call was widely supported both inside the NHS and outside it, ranging from Brexit-supporting Jacob Rees-Mogg to the Remain-supporting general secretary of the TUC.

Stevens argues that "obesity is the new smoking" and has pushed for greater NHS, family, business and government action to tackle it. Stevens initiated NHS England's work with local authorities and developers to 'design in' health promoting built environments. These are now designated 'NHS healthy new towns'. He launched the obesity-reducing NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme and later backed its national expansion. He has championed NHS work to cut sugary drinks and junk food from hospitals, and suggested there should be a national sugar tax. In March 2016 Chancellor George Osborne announced a tax on sugary drinks.

On his return to the NHS, The Guardian reported one health expert as saying "He's coming back to a pay cut [and] the mother of all messes". Stevens' own assessment was that "For the NHS the stakes have never been higher. The global recession has meant the NHS facing its most sustained budget crunch in its history. Service pressures are intensifying, and longstanding problems are not going to disappear overnight." Stevens said his aim was to "Think like a patient, act like a taxpayer." As of 2015, Stevens was paid a salary of between £190,000 and £194,999 by NHS England and each year he has opted for a voluntary £20,000 pay cut. According to Fraser Nelson, hiring Stevens back to run NHS England was one of the cleverest moves that David Cameron made because he "knows more about NHS problems and market solutions than any man alive". During the 2019 General Election campaign while the Labour Party said they would generally not comment on the appointments of public officials, they stated they have a "good relationship with Simon Stevens and respect him.” In March 2019 it was announced Stevens would also lead the hospital regulator, NHS Improvement, effectively merging it into NHS England.

Stevens has also prioritised the modernisation of NHS primary care, mental health and cancer care having commissioned an independent national taskforce led by Sir Harpal Kumar the chief executive of Cancer Research UK. Breast cancer deaths have subsequently fallen faster than in other large European countries and outcomes are estimated to have caught up with or surpassed the European average. In 2015 he commissioned the independent Five Year Forward View for mental health chaired by Paul Farmer the head of MIND. He subsequently directed that each year local mental health spending must rise faster than overall NHS funding growth. Given increasing concerns about young people’s mental health and eating disorders, he voiced concern on the BBC's Andrew Marr show about cosmetic surgery adverts during ITV's Love Island series. Shortly after, ITV's chief executive agreed to reconsider the ads, and the Advertising Standards Authority went on to ban them. He has suggested that social media companies might be asked to contribute to funding improved mental health support for young people. He has announced a dedicated confidential national mental health support service for NHS doctors.

While supporting expanded health training opportunities for UK workers, he has backed ongoing selective international recruitment in the NHS. In October 2015 speaking to the Institute of Directors at the Albert Hall he queried why ballet dancers but not nurses were on the Home Office's 'shortage occupation list. A week later the government added nurses to the list. He also led the introduction of an NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard to track and improve the experience and fair treatment of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Staff across the health service. Stevens supports a greater role for the voluntary sector and volunteering in the NHS, as a complement to the work of NHS staff.

He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Birmingham in 2015, and is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

He was responsible for the Five Year Forward View produced by NHS England in October 2014. This marked the beginning of a major shift in how NHS care is delivered, in contrast to NHS policy since 1991. Instead care is increasingly being redesigned to achieve what Stevens labelled the "triple integration" of primary and specialist care, physical and mental health services, and NHS and social care. He has however recently challenged the longstanding assumption that this will mean there is a need for fewer hospital beds.

He has also argued that the NHS – as the largest employer in Britain – is an 'anchor institution' in many local communities, and so needs to "get more creative in developing staffing and clinical models that will enable us to sustain services and consider second and third order effects in terms of jobs and economic impact and social cohesion".

Since 2013 Stevens has served on the board of directors of the Commonwealth Fund of New York and is a member of its Investment Committee.

From 2004 to 2014 Stevens was a senior executive at UnitedHealth Group. Initially appointed president of UnitedHealth Europe, he became CEO of UnitedHealthcare's $30 billion Medicare business, and then corporate Executive Vice President and president of its global health businesses spanning the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He also was a director of Brazil's largest hospital group AMIL.

Stevens was a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics from 2004 to 2008, and is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Simon Stevens was born in Birmingham, England, the son of a Baptist minister and a university administrator. He was educated at a state comprehensive, St. Bartholomew's School, and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford University, where he was elected president of the Oxford Union. His friends at Balliol reportedly ranged from Extinction Rebellion's Rupert Read to Boris Johnson who credited Stevens with Johnson's own election as Oxford Union president. Stevens later received an MBA from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and was a Harkness Fellow at Columbia University, New York. His wife, Maggie, is a public health specialist from New York City. Their son was born on Christmas Day 2003 at St Thomas' Hospital and their daughter in 2008.

In 1997 he was appointed policy adviser to two successive Secretaries of State for Health (Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn) at the UK Department of Health. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Government's health policy adviser in the Number 10 Policy Unit to Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. Stevens was a Labour councillor for Brixton, in the London Borough of Lambeth 1998–2002. He was closely associated with the development of the NHS Plan 2000.

After university Stevens first worked in Guyana, and then from 1988 to 1997 as a healthcare manager in the UK and internationally. He started his NHS career on the NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme at Shotley Bridge General Hospital, the largest employer in Consett, County Durham, after the closure of the steel works. After a spell in Congo and Malawi, he became general manager for a large NHS psychiatric hospital outside Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and ran community mental health services for North Tyneside and Northumberland. He was then appointed group manager of Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals in London before moving to New York City Health Department.

Sir Simon Laurence Stevens (born 4 August 1966) is a British health manager and public policy analyst. His appointment as the eighth Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England with effect from 1 April 2014 was announced in October 2013, succeeding David Nicholson. He was said by the Health Service Journal in December 2013 to be the second most powerful person in the English NHS, even before he took up his appointment. He has stayed top of their list of the most influential people in health ever since.