Vale, Dr Richard Taylor (1934-2024)

Consultant who became an independent MP in a bid to restore the accident and emergency department at his local Kidderminster Hospital and served for nine years

The 2001 general election was dull. A Labour victory and another four or five years of Tony Blair’s premiership were inevitable, and everyone knew that William Hague, who had been the Conservative leader since 1997, would not be able to prevent it. In the end, there was even less change than expected: Labour lost six of its 418 seats and a mere 2.5 per cent of its vote, but maintained an overwhelming majority of 167 in the House of Commons. There was one alarming factor, however. Perhaps because the result was so widely anticipated, and perhaps because the electorate was broadly content, turnout collapsed, falling to 59.4 per cent, the lowest since the post-First World War “coupon election” of 1918. That precipitous 12 per cent drop from 1997 has never been recovered.

In an election dubbed “the quiet landslide” by the media, one result caught the eye. In Wyre Forest, a Worcestershire constituency based around the towns of Kidderminster, Stourport and Bewdley, there was considerable anger that Kidderminster General Hospital had seen its accident and emergency department closed despite public protests. Dr Richard Taylor, a 67-year-old retired consultant who had worked at the hospital for nearly 25 years and chaired the Save Kidderminster Hospital Campaign, stood as a candidate in the election under the banner of Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern to highlight the issue and continue the campaign for the A&E department’s restoration. The group had been founded in 2000 and had won 18 seats on Wyre Forest District Council by the time Taylor announced his candidacy in March 2001.

The sitting Labour MP, who had wrested the seat from the Conservatives by 7,000 votes in 1997, was David Lock, a 41-year-old barrister and parliamentary secretary at the Lord Chancellor’s Department under Lord Irvine of Lairg. He was an able enough if forgettable man whose wife was a local general practitioner, and his party had a good story to sell on a national level. But generalised rises in spending on public services were not as important for voters as a specific local closure. In addition, Lock struck the wrong tone: he accused Health Concern of distorting facts to whip up concern unduly, and tried to portray his opponents as lacking expertise.

Local people are not taken in by campaigners who try to pretend they know more about the health service than doctors, nurses and the health authority.

There were defensible, logical in favour of downgrading Kidderminster’s A&E department to a minor injuries unit, with emergency cases being handled at Worcester Royal Infirmary 18 miles away. Worcestershire Health Authority had a multi-million pound deficit, but the closure at Kidderminster was balanced by the construction of a new acute general hospital, Worcestershire Royal Hospital, with 500 beds and nine operating theatres, on the eastern side of the city. It would open in March 2002, having been built at a cost of £85 million under the controversial Private Finance Initiative. In addition, a new deal on pay and conditions for junior doctors, some of whom at Kidderminster Hospital had until then been working well over 100 hours a week, made it increasingly difficult for the NHS to provide the necessary levels of staffing for the A&E department.

Richard Taylor and Health Concern, however, had a clear and compelling narrative. In February 2001, a pensioner, John Jones, who lived five minutes away from Kidderminster Hospital, suffered a heart attack. In the absence of emergency care at Kidderminster, he was taken by ambulance to Worcester Royal Infirmary, a 50-minute journey which took Jones directly past the former A&E department. He was pronounced dead 20 minutes after arriving in Worcester.

Taylor, a genial, well-spoken and articulate Cambridge graduate who had performed his National Service as a medical officer in the Royal Air Force, pressed home Health Concern’s message effectively and with a physician’s bedside manner.

The hospital is woven into the fabric of Kidderminster life. There has been a hospital here since 1920. It has been supported by the people all the way through—the [hospital’s] League of Friends has raised between £2.5 million and £3 million in the last decade.

For all that, independent candidates rarely succeed in general elections (Taylor stood under the Health Concern banner but was effectively an independent, with no sizeable party machine or finance behind him). Only four independent MPs had been elected in Britain since the end of the Second World War, the most recent being the former BBC correspondent Martin Bell who had defeated the Conservative Neil Hamilton, embroiled in accusations of financial misconduct, in Tatton in 1997. Bell had benefited from an existing public profile and the decision of Labour and the Liberal Democrats not to field candidates against him.

Taylor won anyway. The Liberal Democrats did not contest the seat but the Conservatives did, but Taylor galloped to an emphatic victory over Lock by a huge 17,630 votes, winning 58 per cent of the vote. Labour and Conservative support collapsed as voters decided to send a clear message to the government: they cared more about a well-argued local campaign than anything else, no matter how much money had been poured into the NHS, no matter what state-of-the-art facilities were being built elsewhere.

As a Member of Parliament, Taylor understandably focused on health policy. He became co-chair of the All-Party Local Hospital Group, vice-chairman of the All-Party Group on Cancer and secretary of the All-Party Group on Patient and Public Involvement in Health. Shortly after the election, the Department of Health acknowledged Taylor’s victory by announcing an independent clinical review of future elective services at Kidderminster Hospital led by Professor Ara Darzi, professor of surgery at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. In September, the review recommended that the £14 million diagnostic and treatment centre at Kidderminster should be expanded, with 20 extra beds and a wider range of surgical procedures. Taylor, only a few months into his unexpected parliamentary career, hailed this as a considerable success.

This is the biggest U-turn because it recognises that there aren’t enough beds in Worcestershire. It comes on the day when they have admitted that they will be 80 beds short across the county even with the new PFI hospital being built in Worcester. What they are offering us is, in fact, very welcome. It’s far, far less than we would want and need but it’s very welcome.

This was perfectly fair political points-scoring, but the review had not resulted in the re-opening of the A&E department; indeed, Kidderminster never regained its previous facilities. By 2002, Andy Beckett in The Guardian was writing rather sniffily about the questionable “desirability of single-issue activists becoming MPs”, raising doubts “about the rightness, or otherwise, of local rebellions over how national resources are distributed” and even querying Taylor’s “politics more generally”. Some on the mainstream left seemed to suggest that Taylor was some kind of crypto-Tory, although Beckett was generous enough to call him “a libertarian with an Old Labour and Old Tory streak”.

Nevertheless, Taylor chose to offer himself for re-election in 2005. “I decided to stand again when I realised that although services are returning they are not doing so fast enough and there’s still a lot of work to do,” he told The Daily Telegraph. He pointed to policies on other areas like education, tourism and redevelopment but was inevitably seen as principally as a health campaigner. Repeating the generosity of 2001, the Liberal Democrats did not contest Wyre Forest, but Taylor faced Labour’s Marc Bayliss (now Conservative parliamentary candidate for Worcester) and Mark Garnier of the Conservatives, as well as former television chef Rustie Lee standing for the UK Independence Party. As Labour eased to a third consecutive victory nationally, Taylor’s support dropped by 18 per cent but he held his seat by a margin of 5,250.

I joined the House of Commons Service on 3 October 2005, and my first role was as second clerk of the Health Committee. With Labour’s majority being reduced to 66, the proportionate membership of select committees changed, and the 11-member Health Committee consisted of six government MPs and five from the opposition. The experienced and respected Wakefield MP David Hinchliffe stepped down after eight years as chairman and was replaced by fellow Yorkshireman Kevin Barron, who had been MP for Rother Valley since 1983. A former parliamentary private secretary to Neil Kinnock, Barron had been a shadow health minister from 1994 to 1997 but, to widespread surprise, was not given a ministerial post in the first Blair government.

Of the other five Labour members of the committee, three stayed on from the previous parliament: John Austin, Jim Dowd and Dr Doug Naysmith. The new arrivals were Charlotte Atkins and Dr Howard Stoate (who had previously been a member 1997-2001). On the opposition side, David Amess had been on the committee since 1998 and was joined by two new Conservative MPs, Anne Milton and Mike Penning. As the third party in the Commons, the Liberal Democrats were entitled two seats on a committee of 11; Paul Burstow had joined in 2003 and remained on, but the party had since 2001 foregone its second seat so that Dr Richard Taylor could be a member.

I would only spend a year with the committee, moving to another post in October 2006, and I was learning my craft all the time. I managed inquiries into smoking in public places and independent sector treatment centres, as well as handling other parts of the committee’s work, and got to know all the members reasonably well, travelling with them to Ireland and Sweden as well as a rather unglamorous day trip around treatment centres in the South East. John Austin left shortly after I joined, to be replaced by Ronnie Campbell, and Paul Burstow was later replaced by Sandra Gidley. Perhaps I was lucky, or perhaps I was as-yet-unjaded, but the committee had on the whole a happy and collegiate atmosphere, with Members genuinely working collaboratively to conduct proper scrutiny. Of course partisan tempers flared occasionally, as they always do, and some Members were more dedicated and diligent than others. Equally some were more able than others.

Some of that, I’m sure, was due to the level of professional expertise. The chairman had been a lay member of the General Medical Council since 1999, John Austin had been a medical laboratory technician, Anne Milton had been a nurse, Howard Stoate was a general practitioner who maintained his practice, Doug Naysmith was an immunology researcher, Sandra Gidley was a qualified pharmacist and, of course, Richard Taylor was a retired hospital consultant.

Perhaps there was also an element of fresh buoyancy about the Conservative Members, as Michael Howard, who had become party leader in 2003, had led them to increase their parliamentary representation by 33 seats at the election. Tony Blair had announced in 2004 that he would not seek to remain as prime minister beyond the election after next, although he initially pledged to serve a “full third term” (that is, 2005 to 2010 or so). While there was no expectation that the Conservatives were favourites to win in 2010, there was a feeling for the first time that they could at least look to a future which had glimmers of brightness in it. At the same time, Labour had not yet succumbed to the kind of corrosive ennui that afflicts parties after long periods in government. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, had increased their strength for the third time in a row, and their tally of 62 MPs was the highest for the third party since 1923. Perhaps everyone had something to be cheerful about.

All of this has, in a sense, been context for what I wanted to say. Richard Taylor was, inevitably, preoccupied above all by health policy, and I suspect his membership of the Health Committee was one of his most valued roles at Westminster. Although the committee only met once a week, relatively leisurely by modern standards, as far as I can discern from the formal records Taylor never missed a formal meeting in the time I was second clerk. Moreover he was never what a later chairman on a different committee would describe mordantly as “a warm body”, that is, an MP attending simply to make up the numbers: he was always well briefed, curious, engaged and constructive. Although he had spent decades working in hospital medicine, he was not, nor did he ever claim to be, an expert in every clinical field, much less in the wider spheres of health management, economics and government policy. When he asked questions, however, he did so in an earnest spirit of inquiry, trying to understand for himself what others seemed to grasp more quickly but perhaps more lightly.

He was not unerringly correct. The late 1990s and early 2000s were years of extraordinarily deep transformation for the NHS. GP fundholding was abolished in 1997, giving way to primary care groups in 1999 and then to primary care trusts in 2001. The NHS Executive’s eight regional offices were reorganised as strategic health authorities in 2002, and were then stripped of many of their powers in 2006. Semi-autonomous foundation trusts were unveiled in 2002, and in 2004 the Department of Health established Monitor (the Independent Regulator for Foundation Trusts) to oversee them. 2007, after I had left the committee, was argued by some to be the first year since 1993 in which no major organisational reforms had been proposed or implemented. At the same time, New Labour’s 13 years in power saw six secretaries of state for health, of wildly varying abilities and allegiances, of whom the only genuinely transformative and visionary, in my opinion, was Alan Milburn (1999-2003).

Under those circumstances, it was not surprising—and this is in no way a criticism—that Taylor’s experience of the NHS quickly dated. He had, after all, retired as a full-time clinician in 1995, and had undertaken his initial medical training in the 1950s, becoming a junior doctor when the National Health Service was only a dozen years old. The fault was more often in others than himself; because he was a doctor, and had been elected to Parliament on an issue of health policy, he was often assumed to be omniscient, but he never claimed to be. Equally, there were times when perhaps his Platonic ideal of a health service owed too much to his younger days of the 1950s and 1960s.

These are very minor observations. Two things are important about Richard Taylor. The first is that, because he was elected effectively as an independent Member of Parliament and on a single issue, he did not have to factor in party politics or the broader patchwork of whole-government policy when he thought about policy. It is a fair criticism that this gave him a degree of freedom from compromise and trade-offs, but it also allowed him to focus on a public service which was and remains central to the interests of the electorate. He brought a background of familiarity and experience, and even if the world of the NHS had moved on since his working life, it gave him the ability to know which questions to ask.

Much more important from my point of view, as an official working for a select committee, was that Richard was quite simply a kind, decent, considerate, dedicated man. He approached his parliamentary duties in absolute earnest, though was never dour or joyless; there was always a twinkle of good humour about him, a generosity of spirit which assumed the best in others. He was, in my experience anyway, unfailingly courteous and grateful for the work that officials did, and he had an ability to put people at ease without resorting to forced overfamiliarity. Perhaps he was a product of his generation and background, educated at public school and Cambridge, and trained in a health service which was much more hierarchical and deferential, especially to doctors, than it is now; perhaps that gave him a sense of comfort and privilege. If so, he wore it extremely lightly.

Richard ran for re-election again in 2010, which was probably a mistake. He was nearly 76 and had already exceeded expectations for the longevity of an independent MP, and it was more than a decade since Kidderminster Hospital’s accident and emergency department, his original casus belli, had closed. He was personally popular and an effective Member of Parliament, but a truth many MPs prefer not to recognise is that the individual character of elected representatives is rarely the decisive factor at polls. Politics had moved on, and he faced candidates from all the major parties. Although Richard performed creditably, Mark Garnier, in his second attempt as Conservative candidate, beat him by 2,643 votes. He would stand again in 2015, this time for the National Health Action Party, but could only finish fourth, behind Garnier and his Labour and UKIP opponents. In politics, as in life, there is rarely any going back.

One could take the view that Richard Taylor’s nine years as an independent MP leaves little trace. He failed to reverse the single measure on which he was elected, the closure of Kidderminster Hospital’s accident and emergency department, and it is hard to argue that he has left much trace on the general direction of health policy. The National Health Action Party is a small pressure group, and Taylor had no discernible effect on the party system nor did he trigger an avalanche of hyper-local, single-issue independent Members of Parliament.

On the other hand, those criticisms could be levelled at the vast majority of party MPs, the stalwart lobby fodder who bulk out the House of Commons. Richard spent two parliaments as an active, informed and earnest scrutineer of government policy, probably smoothing off a thousand tiny rough edges in bills, statutory instruments, command papers and consultations, and he did it with unfailing courtesy and humour. We cannot have a House of Commons of 650 Richard Taylors, or even 65, but there is much good in one or two from time to time. Most of all, speaking personally, to have worked with a Member who was completely reliable and reasonable not only took a few percentage points of stress out of the day, it was a genuine pleasure. It is nearly two decades since I had regular dealings with him, and he died approaching his 90th birthday, for which any of us should be grateful, but I will miss him.