After a career as a hospital consultant, in London local government and as an Opposition spokesman in the House of Commons, in 1979 Gerard Vaughan became Minister for Health in the Department of Health and Social Security, where he served first under Patrick Jenkin and then under Norman Fowler. A man well to the right of a party, which was committed to cutting what it saw as National Health Service waste and extravagance, he was closely associated with a determination to strengthen private-sector medicine and give it a larger role in the nation’s healthcare.
He was an early proponent of plans for an insurance-based (rather than tax-based) NHS, and instituted studies of the way healthcare was organised both in the US and in some Continental countries (notably France). These proposals were immediately attacked from within the service as heralding a return to the pre-Bevan and pre-Beveridge era, when the sole yardstick for access to medical treatment was the ability to pay for it.
Vaughan’s boss, Patrick Jenkin, had already sent a frisson of apprehension through the ranks of NHS supporters when in May 1980 he spoke while opening a private nursing home in Bury St Edmunds of the Government’s “overriding duty and commitment to the National Health Service, which for the foreseeable future will continue to to meet the health needs of the majority of our people”. The words “for the foreseeable future” were seized upon by the Left as implying that the Government did not have a perpetual commitment to maintaining the NHS.
In fact, reform was a much more thorny problem than either Jenkin or Vaughan could have foreseen. In the summer of 1980, as a very preliminary step towards the notion of the NHS’s embracing co-operation with the private sector, Vaughan exhorted health authorities to contract out more of their work to profit-making clinics. But reaction by 14 regional health authorities and three area health authorities to a circular sent out by the Department of Health on June 30, was tentative in the extreme. The stock response was that waiting-lists were usually the result of cash shortages, and the situation could only be made worse by the widespread use of expensive private facilities.
Many authorities objected that the reorganisation of the health service that had been instituted by the Government, with the setting up of district health authorities to replace the regions, absorbed all their energies and was preventing a major rethink on the use of available funds. Three months after the circular was issued, little progress had been made on its recommendations.
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In the event, in 1981 Patrick Jenkin was replaced as Secretary of State at the Department of Health by Norman Fowler, and having been involved in health matters in both Opposition and Government since 1975, Vaughan asked for a move. Early in the following year he went as Minister of State to the Department of Trade, with responsibility for consumer affairs.
Gerard Ffolliott Vaughan was born the son of an RAF officer in 1923 in Xinavane, in what was then Portuguese East Africa. He was educated privately there and then at London University, where he read medicine. He qualified at Guy’s Hospital in 1947, subsequently proceeding to membership and, later, fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians. From 1958 to 1979 he was a consultant at Guy’s. He specialised in community affairs and social medicine, and acted as adviser to a number of voluntary organisations, including the National Society for Autistic Children, and the National Institute for the Deaf.
From 1955 he was active in local government, first as an alderman on the London County Council and later, from 1966, representing Lambeth on the Greater London Council. He was chairman of the strategic planning committee of the GLC from 1968 to 1971. After an unsuccessful tilt for the Conservatives at Poplar in 1955, he got into Parliament for Reading at the general election of 1970, which brought Edward Heath to power. He subsequently served as MP for Reading South, 1974-83, and Reading East, 1983-97.
After the defeat of the Conservatives in the first of the two general elections of 1974, he became an Opposition front bench spokesman on the social services and health matters. He was therefore a natural candidate for the post of Health Minister, when Margaret Thatcher won the general election of 1979. After his three years in that office he had one more year at the Department of Trade before moving to the backbenches in 1983. He was knighted in the following year.
Thereafter he was an active member of select committees, on education, 1983-93, and on science and technology, 1993-97. He was also chairman of the Party and Scientific Committee, 1991-94. He retired from Parliament at the general election of 1997. He had a number of medical publications to his credit.
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He was a great believer in homoeopathy, and was a patron of the British Homoeopathic Association. One of his acts when Minister for Health in 1979 had been to act to prevent the closure of five out of ten of the wards at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, by sending out a partial holding order to the health authority concerned. As a result only two of the wards were closed. To the end of his life he took a close interest in the welfare of the RLHH (now part of University College Hospitals) and in its current refurbishment.
He is survived by his wife Thurle, whom he married in 1955, and by a son and a daughter.
Sir Gerard Vaughan, Minister for Health at the DHSS, 1979-82, and Minister of State at the Department of Trade, 1982-83, was born on June 11, 1923. He died on July 29, 2003, aged 80.