Ex-Health Chair appointed as UK Covid corruption commissioner

Tuesday 03 December 2024

The former Chair of Jersey's Health Advisory Board – who stepped down earlier this year after just five weeks in post – has been appointed as the UK government's new Covid corruption commissioner.

In the newly-created role, Tom Hayhoe will spearhead Labour's efforts to recover public money lost to fraud, error and underperforming contracts during the pandemic.

His first task will be reviewing the £8.7 billion worth of PPE bought during the pandemic that then had to be written off by the UK government. He will report to Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Mr Hayhoe was appointed as the first substantive Chair of the Jersey's Health Advisory Board in February, bringing more than 35 years’ experience in health leadership to the island.

But after only five weeks he stepped down from the role in "mutual agreement" with Health Minister Tom Binet due to "differences in working styles".

Following his departure, Mr Hayhoe said he was “worried about the level of staff morale in the organisation" and was "concerned about the need to recover confidence in the medical services on the island". 

In a public hearing in April, he also slammed the culture in Jersey's Health Department as "massively hierarchical" with "insufficient respect for the professions outside medicine, like nurses, pharmacists and therapists".

At the time, he described the department as being "like a service that I would have been involved with in the 1980s, compared to what I expect with modern medicine".

Mr Hayhoe said: “I also didn’t have a sense of any respect for the sorts of things which add up to good clinical governance, like attitudes to medical appraisal.

“I heard things about a degree of lip service being paid to those.

“From raw data, I also had a sense of a culture in which there was no appetite to report incidences, and the convention was cover-up, rather than saying something had gone wrong.

“The tendency is for people to pretend that it didn’t happen.”