I am writing this short blog under duress. But colleagues at Cordis Bright insisted I write it to reflect on our 25 years. Personally, I don’t have much time for looking back, not least of all because no one ever agrees on what actually happened. I think Cordis Bright came into existence because it seemed to me that there were other ways of supporting the health and social care sector which didn’t look like pale imitations of the then ‘big five’ consultants, but that is just my opinion.

When Cordis Bright first started, Tony Blair had been Prime Minister for just over a year, unbelievably Arsenal had won the Premiership a few months earlier and Boyzone was number one in the charts with ‘No Matter What’. Our beginning was modest, a single small office on Worship Street and a communal kitchen shared with the Women’s Environmental Network (who I note now have much nicer offices in Shoreditch). For a small company we managed to grow quite quickly, going from one to four people in the space of a year.

I am sorry to report that we have kept nearly all of what were then termed the ‘Speakers Notes’ from the Cordis Briefing, which is still running successfully today. So these reflections are backed-up with hard evidence...

In the Cordis Briefing of August 1998, we were observing that the Labour government were struggling a bit to bring in their reforms of health and social care. They had already set up a Royal Commission on Long Term Care (the recommendations of which they would later reject). We already knew there was to be a national minimum wage of £3.60 per hour. At the time, Unison estimated that it would increase the wages of around 50% of the social care workforce. A workforce survey undertaken by Community Care (which then was a magazine you could buy a copy of in WH Smith) had just found that 80% of social care staff felt they were working under unacceptable levels of stress and partly as a result of this had a level of sickness around twice as high as any other sector of industry.

The Labour government were championing a whole raft of reforms, the creation of Primary Care Trusts, pooled budgets, tons of ideas about better working conditions including union recognition and the working time directive.

Of course, it didn’t all work and eventually like many governments that are in power for years it began to run out of steam. But, to be fair, the ideas kept on coming right up to the end when they set out their plans for a National Care Service in their 2010 manifesto.

It seems incredible but in effect from 2010 onwards we had an approach to government which was really about dismantling and undoing all the progress that had been made to improve health and social care. The Coalition government had a narrow fiscally-illiterate approach which helped no one who actually needed any help, but cheered members of the Conservative party. Prime Minister Cameron took a laissez-faire approach to managing his Coalition cabinet. Which is why, having promised no reorganisation of the NHS, a perfectly effective system of managing health in the form of Primary Care Trusts (and one which offered the opportunity for much closer working with local government) was abandoned by Health Minister Andrew Lansley in favour of reforms so bad that they had to stop them midway and reset to prevent disaster.

The idea of chronically underfunded services delivered by chronically underpaid staff became the new normal of health and social care. We would probably still be there if not for the Covid-19 pandemic.

The catastrophe of the pandemic of 2020 revealed two great truths:

• We had been led by incompetent and uncaring politicians who maintained a deliberate and convenient ignorance of the perilous state of public services.
• The health and social care workforce was made-up of underpaid people who were willing to go not just the extra mile, but the extra 10 or 20 miles to do their jobs well and protect the people that they cared for.

The legacies of the pandemic will last a long time and have probably made fundamental changes to the way in which services are planned and delivered. As I write this, the Public Inquiry into the handling of the pandemic has just begun and, as we predicted, panic and buck-passing are already manifest.

One of the dangers of working in the same sector for over 25 years is you can easily start to believe you have seen it all before. That what goes around, comes around. This simply isn’t true. Real change for the better does happen, it’s just that real change is often frustratingly, agonisingly slow: it can often feel like two steps forward and one step back.

When Cordis Bright started, we didn’t have a Human Rights Act (it passed in November 1998), there was no Good Friday Agreement, no same-sex marriage, no civil partnerships for everyone, no Equality Act, the idea of person-centred services was still some way off although the journey towards greater user control and accountability had begun.

I have no idea about the next 25 years. It will probably be about people increasingly setting their own terms for how health and social care works with them. It will definitely be about technology and innovation. But it will also continue to be about simple human relationships of accountability and trust.

All the people who have worked for Cordis Bright and continue to work for it today are pleased and privileged to have played their small part contributing to a better future for health, social care and criminal justice.

In the immortal words of Boyzone: ‘No matter where it's barren a dream is being born’.

Tom Noon is Chair and Founder of Cordis Bright and is writing in a personal capacity.

Cordis Bright was founded on 21 August 1998.