Simon Laurence Stevens, Baron Stevens of Birmingham (born 4 August 1966) is Chair of the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Chair of Cancer Research UK, Chair of King's College London, and an independent member of the House of Lords. In Parliament he focuses on defence and international relations (particularly maritime issues), science, the environment, health, and higher education policy. Stevens was for seven years previously Chief Executive of NHS England. Earlier in his career he was senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister, a senior executive in the private sector, and worked internationally including in Guyana, Malawi, and the United States.
Current work Stevens is Chair of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which regulates British shipping, the wider UK maritime sector and runs HM Coastguard search and rescue services for the United Kingdom. He is Chair of the governing council of King's College London. He is Chair of Cancer Research UK, the world's largest independent funder of cancer science. He is a crossbench peer.
Early and personal life 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 in Newbury, Berkshire, and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was elected president of the Oxford Union. 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. He lists his hobbies as family, sailing, books and "cooking without recipes". He regularly competes in offshore yacht races such as the Rolex Sydney-Hobart and the Rolex Fastnet Race.
Early career 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.
Government Stevens served as a senior government policy adviser for seven years from 1997 to 2004: first to successive Secretaries of State for Health at the UK Department of Health, and then as senior policy adviser in the Number 10 Policy Unit to Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was closely associated with the development of the NHS Plan 2000. He was also an elected Labour councillor for Brixton, in the London Borough of Lambeth 1998–2002, though for at least the past 15 years he has not been a member of any political party.
Private sector From 2004 to 2014, Sir Simon 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.
Non-profits/charities Stevens is a member of the Board of Directors of the Commonwealth Fund of New York and Chair of Cancer Research UK. He was instrumental in establishing an academic institute to publish information about the costs of US health care. It showed that - contrary to prior research mainly using public Medicare data - cost differences in the working age population were often because of market pricing power by hospitals, rather than because of excessive use of services by patients. He also served on the boards of the Minnesota Historical Society; the Minnesota Opera; and the Medicare Rights Center (New York), as well as the King's Fund and the Nuffield Trust.
NHS Chief Executive
Stevens was appointed as Chief Executive of NHS England after a worldwide competitive search, and served under Prime Ministers David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. 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". 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 "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." In a speech following his appointment to the role of CEO in 2014 he set out an agenda for reform.Full text of Simon Stevens' speech. NHS (2014-04-01). Retrieved 2021-06-28. A profile in the British Medical Journal claimed he is "intellectually gifted, charming, funny, and a great communicator. He is a natural and persuasive leader who exudes quiet confidence. He is widely read and writes superbly. He's got such a big brain he can be easily bored [but] he is a 'natural egalitarian'. Another comments, 'The new system is about distributed leadership. That will play to his strengths. He's very collegiate.' A third says, 'He's pragmatic and not ideologically driven. He'll ask how we can make this work. He's seen the rough end of the NHS - Stevens's predecessor in one post [died by] suicide'."
As the NHS England CEO, Stevens was directly accountable to Parliament for management of £150 billion of annual NHS funding. He frequently gave 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. As of 2020, Stevens was paid a salary of between £195,000 and £199,000 by NHS England and each year he has opted for a voluntary £20,000 pay cut. During the 2019 general election campaign, while the Labour Party said they would generally not comment on public officials, they stated they had 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.
As NHS England Chief Executive, he has given lectures and speeches at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Exeter, London, Birmingham, York, Manchester, Southampton, Newcastle, and previously at Harvard, Yale, and NYU. Before taking up his NHS role, from time-to-time he authored articles in various health-related research journals. He is regularly interviewed on the BBC, ITV, Sky News, Channel 4 News and The Today Programme, as well as The Andrew Marr Show. He has also appeared on Jeremy Vine, BBC Breakfast, Any Questions? and The One Show.
Innovation and research As CEO of NHS England Stevens oversaw within the overall £150 billion NHS budget a fund of £19 billion for medical and life sciences specialised services, innovation and R&D. He also established a ring-fenced fund within NHS England for innovative new medicines, particularly for rare conditions. He actively promoted genomics, and cell and gene therapies on the NHS. 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 also announced that NHS England had also successfully negotiated a confidential deal to make available a gene therapy said to be "the most expensive drug in the world" with a reported list price of £1.8 million per patient. However he publicly refused to accept the prices a US drug company initially wanted to charge the NHS for its cystic fibrosis drugs, until the company eventually agreed a confidential discounted deal for UK patients. He also accused Essential Pharma of "using the cover of coronavirus to try and price-gouge British taxpayers". The UK Competition and Markets Authority subsequently took action, calling the company's plans "particularly concerning". He has pushed the use of AI and Machine Learning in healthcare and NHS England is hosting a new £250 million NHS AI Lab. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos he launched the first wave of NHS Innovation Test Beds. and introduced a new NHS innovation payment. Stevens took action to stop NHS funding of homeopathy, on the grounds that it is "at best a placebo and a misuse of scarce NHS funds." NHS England was sued by the British Homeopathic Association who argued that Stevens' criticisms, including on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, prejudged its public consultation. The High Court dismissed the BHA challenge, and backed NHS England. He later warned patients not to believe claims that homeopathic 'duck extract' was an effective covid treatment. In a speech at Oxford University he took aim at the "dubious and dodgy" anti-science in Gwyneth Paltrow's Netflix show, The Goop Lab.
NHS reform He was responsible for the Five Year Forward View produced by NHS England in October 2014 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 argued that government pay freezes for NHS staff, made to achieve cost savings, threatened the NHS's ability to recruit and argued that NHS wages should keep pace with the private sector.Merrifield, Nicola (2014-10-23). Nurses will quit without 'competitive' pay, concedes Simon Stevens. Nursing Times. Retrieved 2021-06-28. Stevens has prioritised the modernisation of mental health and cancer care He subsequently introduced shorter waiting times standards for mental health services, directed that each year local mental health spending must rise faster than overall NHS funding growth, He has however challenged the longstanding assumption that this will mean there is a need for fewer hospital beds. 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, and 40 new mental health hubs for NHS staff affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.