Public Health England is to be scrapped and replaced by a new organisation set up specifically to deal with a pandemic, it has been reported. The organisation has been widely criticised for its response to the coronavirus outbreak. However, former NHS Trust Chairman Roy Lilley voiced worries that now is not the time to be making importance changes to the heart of the UK’s public health functions.
He told talkRADIO: “Public Health England’s responsible for everything from making sure pork sausages don’t poison us to Porton Down.
“At this time, the Government is distracted with all kinds of other things, and there’s maybe another pandemic on the sidelines.
“What we’ve got now is kind of sorted out and it will see us through.
“But the upheaval of a huge merger and the unpicking of this will be a huge distraction.”
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Mr Lilley continued: “Things like this never work anyway.
“All the research into organisations that merge say 40 percent of them don’t work.
“So I think to do it now is reckless.
“If the report is to be relied on, then the first stage of this is going to be done by September.”
In July, Mr Hancock hinted that the body could not continue in its current form.
He told MPs: “It was not set up to be an organisation ready to go to mass national scale and we didn’t go into this crisis with that mass of testing capability.”
The desire to centralise pandemic work and the refusal to engage with industry willing to help were cited as failures of PHE.
Over 300,000 positive cases of coronavirus have been recorded in the UK since the start of the outbreak.
Just over 41,000 people have died as a result of the virus.
