The hunt is on for a new finance chief for the NHS. Official confirmation is due tomorrow that Colin Reeves, the quietly authoritative and respected director of finance, is off to the private sector in a move that will leave a big hole in the senior management team at a critical period for the government's NHS reforms.
Reeves, who has been in the post for more than six years, is to head the review board of the Accountancy Foundation, a regulatory body. Meanwhile, his deputy, Bill McCarthy, will also leave to take up an unspecified operational job within the NHS.
The official steer is that the moves reflect a feeling that with the NHS plan published, the big finance management challenges now lie outside the Department of Health. Yet, with £19bn being invested in the health service over the next four years, the lack of any obvious successor to Reeves will cause comment.
McCarthy, who was chief number-cruncher to Alan Milburn, health secretary, during the drafting of the NHS plan, would clearly have been in the frame had he not opted for a change.
There appears to be no whiff of scandal, or falling out, accompanying Reeves's resignation. Indeed, it is suggested that Milburn asked him in vain to stay. Reeves wavered, but eventually decided to go to what will, in its own field, be a higher profile, as well as better paid, job.
News of his departure follows a wider management reorganisation at the top of the NHS, instituted by new chief executive Nigel Crisp. He will shortly appoint a new head of primary care to replace the recently departed Mike Farrar.
Reeves's successor will retain responsibility for NHS and social care financial matters, but will no longer have responsibility for performance management areas such as waiting lists. That role passes to Neil McKay, recently appointed chief operating officer.
Reeves, an experienced NHS accountant, moved to the top NHS finance job in the mid-90s alongside then chief executive Alan Langlands, with whom he had worked at the former North West Thames regional health authority. As a measure of his success, Reeves has managed to deliver "unqualified" NHS annual accounts - meaning passed by the auditor - in each of the past five years, an achievement far from guaranteed in the early 90s.
Reeves has also been popular among his peers - again, not always the case with his predecessors - and well known for his commitment to supporting colleagues on the front line of NHS financial management.
Last December, when the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), which represents NHS accountants, was publicly rebuked by Langlands for publishing a survey on health authority deficits, Reeves, who was not directly involved, was discreetly supportive.
"Colin was very sympathetic to what we had done," says an HFMA figure. "He never denied the figures were right, and I think he appreciated that the figures had been aired outside his office. I do not doubt he had been telling ministers the same thing from inside his office."
Several names are being mooted as potential successors to Reeves, including John Bacon, director of finance and acting chief executive at the NHS London region (where Crisp was his boss), and John Flook, director of finance at County Durham health authority and a member of the NHS modernisation task force.
