Future Consultations Archive - St George's House

A Blueprint for the NHS – Fixing the Problems

In December 2023, St George’s House, Windsor Castle hosted a consultation on the theme, Health Care – a Radical Rethink. Using cancer care as our template, the consultation looked at how we might best do things differently. The event was generously supported by Cancer Research UK.

Since then, the landscape has altered considerably. A new government is in place and we have a Secretary of State for Health who has stated publicly that the NHS is broken. He has since commissioned a review of NHS performance from Lord Darzi, whose report was published in September.

St George’s House proposes to host a follow-up consultation on 12^th and 13^th December 2024. Using cancer care again as our template, we will seek to provide a practical route map to what may be a better NHS. What does a better NHS look like? We all know the problems but we need to bring innovative, lateral thinking to the solutions, drawing on expertise from within and without the health sector. Considering the findings of the Darzi Report and with your help, let us look properly and pragmatically at how we might do things differently. With your help, let us draw up a St George’s House Manifesto, a working and workable document for the government to consider as it embarks on a programme of reform. Let us seek to provide a bridge from policy to practice.

High Performance Learning

This is an international gathering to promote and explore the concept of High Performance Learning, which uses findings from neuroscience and psychology that suggest we can ‘build’ better brains and attain success for greater numbers of students. Taking what is known about how people reach advanced cognitive performance, the consultation translates this into a workable model for schools.

Feeding the United Kingdom: Avoiding the Inevitable

The UK food and farming sectors are part of a global food system that, over the next years and decades, is likely to suffer existential instability and crises. Already, at a global scale, 10% of people – and rising – are facing chronic hunger. The factors driving this are partly wearily well-rehearsed failures in the food system itself; but these also now interact with and are amplified by escalating and overlapping stresses and flashpoints in our geopolitical, climate, biophysical, trade, and finance systems. It becomes increasingly tenuous to assume that the factors driving insecurity in other parts of the world won’t in the future destabilise the UK’s food and farming sectors.

The future could be grim. And we can’t assume we will be able to control or even influence the ‘incoming’ chronic stresses and acute crises that will face us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take action; to get ahead of the crisis, and to build resilience. To avoid the inevitable.

Real leadership and long-term thinking will be required if we are to navigate these challenges. If we were to gather a ‘war-room’ to do this, what would they need to know about the risks and vulnerabilities of our food and farming sectors? What are the practical and structural features of those sectors that would need to change? Where are the power bases inside and outside the food and farming sectors that have the agency to make this happen? How can they be helped to act coherently, and with direction?

The Jane Goodall Institute

We welcome the return of the Jane Goodall Institute, a gathering of project leaders from across the world who spend a week in Windsor on organisational and personal development, strategic planning and information sharing. The presence of Jane Goodall herself throughout the week is a rare privilege.

Global Food Systems and Livestock

The St George’s House Consultation on Global Food Systems in 2023 identified livestock production as a pivotal issue for transformation of food systems to be sustainable for the future.

There is an urgency to this agenda, since livestock production is a principal driver of, or a major contributor to, biodiversity loss, deforestation, climate change, soil degradation, and overuse and pollution of water. It contributes to key non-communicable diseases and antimicrobial resistance, as well as increasing the risk of future pandemics. The IPCC has identified changes in meat and dairy consumption as one of the most effective measures to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, with co-benefits for the environment, health, food security, animal welfare, and biodiversity.

However, international fora, governments, food businesses and civil society have found it difficult to address the role that livestock should play in future-fit, sustainable food systems. This is particularly pressing for nations of the ‘Global South’, where the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers are under threat from further unsustainable intensification by large-scale producers. In the ‘Global North’ the issue of reduced livestock production and consumption has become highly polarised.

A St George’s House Consultation provides an ideal and constructive forum for a diverse group of key stakeholders to explore the challenges and develop a way forward together. The aim would be co-create a narrative and agenda for action that can be taken into preparation for the critical climate COP30 to be held in Brazil, for the UN Food Systems Summit stock-take and for other international policy fora.

Senior Faith in Leadership

The Senior Faith Leadership programme brings together emergent leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths. During the three days, they explore issues pertinent to leadership and engage in scriptural reasoning as a way of understanding each other’s faith.