Surprise, surprise

The Prime Minister’s decision to go to the polls early caught everybody, including a few of his own party, napping. At the AOP, our external affairs plans for the summer and autumn centred around the received wisdom that the Government would try to hang on as long as it could, with a general election pushed back into the winter. MP engagement, policy shaping, party conference activity: all were timed to support an end-of-year push.

And yet in retrospect, there were signs we could have picked up on. Strikingly, the quiet work we had been doing with No 11 on potential healthcare reforms had come to an unexpected and juddering halt. Pushed for a reason, the Chancellor was more than a little opaque when sharing his sudden decision to down tools – he contented himself with the indication that there was not enough time left to do what we had been planning.

No one should be in any doubt that what parties say in opposition and what they do in government are very different things

Selfishly, the news of a July election is not a major issue for us. Changing our plans is easy enough – we had always known that there might have to be some flex in how we approached the second half of the year.

Critically, we had not made the mistake of leaving our policy influencing to the last minute. Over the past 12 months, we have regularly been engaging with all three major political parties (in England, that is); political engagement with the parties in the other nations is something that we have been working on via Optometry Scotland, Optometry Wales and Optometry Northern Ireland.


With the opinion polls as they are (and have been for since 2022 and that Budget), understandably our main focus has been on Labour. The extent to which that has borne fruit can be judged by the words of Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, who name checked community optometry as one of the solutions to the NHS crisis in his media interviews earlier this week.

We have made huge progress in recent times in raising the profile of optometry in political circles and establishing the AOP as an influential player in the wider healthcare policy debate

But no one should be in any doubt that what parties say in opposition and what they do in government are very different things. It is all very well for us to have put ourselves among the relatively small number of voices who matter as far as Labour’s health policy is concerned. But once Shadow Ministers lose the title “Shadow” and become the real thing, there is an army of paid advisers and civil servants whose job it is to protect them from the likes of us. Ideas that seemed so simple and effective in theory – proper IT connectivity between optometry and ophthalmology as an example – become startlingly difficult to implement in practice, particularly in an environment where government spending will be hugely under pressure.

So let us be realistic. We have made huge progress in recent times in raising the profile of optometry in political circles and establishing the AOP as an influential player in the wider healthcare policy debates. And if, as Sir John Curtice has suggested, there is a 99% likelihood of Labour forming the next administration, we have planted some really important seeds in their minds. Whatever the result, the world of optometry will not be transformed overnight. But come 5 July, it may be the case that we will have a Health and Social Care Secretary who at least understands what optometry can offer. The hard work of coaxing officials and, above all, NHS policymakers, to implement the ideas that we have persuaded them to adopt will be what will occupy us in the year ahead.