Prime Minister Gordon Brown Political party Labour Nationality British Party Labour Party | Prime Minister Gordon Brown Name Philip Baron Prime Minister Gordon Brown Alma mater University of Leeds | |
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Education City of Oxford High School for Boys, University of Leeds Profiles | ||
Succeeded by Willy Bach, Baron Bach | ||
Philip Alexander Hunt, Baron Hunt of Kings Heath, OBE, PC (born 19 May 1949) is a former health administrator and a Labour Co-operative member of the House of Lords.
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Early life and career
Philip Hunt was educated at the City of Oxford High School and Oxford School and left Leeds University in 1970 with a BA in political studies. He became a works study officer in 1972 for the Oxford Regional Hospital Board, moving to Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre as hospital administrator in 1974. He was the first Secretary of Edgware and Hendon Community Health Council. He was the first Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, and previously Director of the National Association of Health Authorities and Trusts (NAHAT) from its formation in 1990. Before that he was Director of its predecessor organisation, the National Association of Health Authorities (NAHA) from 1984 to 1990. In the 1993 Birthday Honours, he was appointed to the Order of the British Empire as an Officer (OBE) for "services to the NHS". He became President of the Royal Society for Public Health in 2010.
Parliamentary career
In 1997, Hunt was created a life peer with the title Baron Hunt of Kings Heath, of Birmingham in the County of West Midlands. He served as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Health from 1999 until his resignation in 2003 over the Invasion of Iraq. He was re-appointed to government in May 2005 as a PUSS at the Department for Work and Pensions. He returned to the Department of Health as Minister of State in January 2007 and then moved to the Ministry of Justice as a PUSS in July of that year. In the October 2008 government reshuffle, Lord Hunt became Minister of State in both the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), as well as acting as the Deputy Leader of the House of Lords. In the June 2009 reshuffle he left DEFRA to focus solely on his roles in the Lords and at the DECC. He was sworn of the Privy Council the same month. In May 2010, he left the DECC when Labour lost the general election.
Following the election of Ed Miliband as Labour Party leader, Lord Hunt was appointed Labour's spokesman on Home Affairs in the House of Lords. He also serves as Labour's Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Lords.
In April 2011 he was appointed Chair of Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust.
In September 2011 he contributed to the book What next for Labour? Ideas for a new generation, his piece was entitled Our NHS: The Labour Party Challenge.