Convening a meeting at No 10 is not a solution to the NHS crisis

Editorial: The prime minister needs a Blair-style delivery unit to drive progress

If Mr Sunak were serious about getting a grip on the NHS crisis, he would have settled the pay dispute with the nurses by now (REUTERS)

Rishi Sunak has hosted what he calls an NHS Recovery Forum at 10 Downing Street – on a Saturday, to show that he means business – but he is already lagging behind the pace and urgency that the issue requires.

He has only been prime minister for 75 days, but that ought to have been long enough to have got beyond the “let’s convene a top-level meeting for the cameras” stage of getting to grips with the crisis in the National Health Service.

The best model for dealing with the problem is the prime minister’s delivery unit that operated under Sir Michael Barber in Tony Blair’s second term. It was a small unit that focused on outcomes, identifying obstacles to achieving them and tracking progress towards targets that would mean that they had been achieved.