Yvette Cooper is a left-field pick for Health Secretary

What does Yvette Cooper as Health Secretary mean for the NHS? It’s a question no one thought to ask before today, which underlines why her appointment is quite left-field. Cooper does have experience: she was a junior minister in the health department back in the very early days of the Blair government and was part of the team that implemented the Sure Start programme. But it’s been a while since those days, and Cooper hasn’t talked that much about health since. Like her new boss, Cooper pledged to integrate health and social care when she and Andy Burnham were candidates in the 2015 Labour leadership election. Beyond that, we just have to go on how she has conducted herself as a minister.

As Home Secretary in particular, Cooper gained a reputation for being quite happy to take policy direction from civil servants. This was in part because she has a similar outlook on life to most mandarins: she believes in doing things properly and likes talking about process rather than taking decisions. In fact, she also has a reputation for being pretty indecisive, and that one stretches back all the way to her time in the last Labour government, where former colleagues recall that she took as long as possible to make decisions.  

Now, perhaps none of this matters when we have a Prime Minister in Burnham who is pretty obsessed with health policy, and who has a pretty clear idea of where he’ll take it too. So perhaps a Health Secretary who is interested in process and implementation is all that’s necessary, rather than another figure with big ideas. In fact, one of the themes of this reshuffle so far is that the key moves seem to have been ministers who don’t have big agendas. Whether that will go down well with some of the remaining figures in the department who do have an agenda, such as former health secretary turned adviser Alan Milburn, is a question that could lead to some early drama.