Health minister quits and urges Prime Minister to resign

Health minister Dr Zubir Ahmed has resigned from his role while urging Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign from his post.

Dr Ahmed, who was the minister for health innovation and safety and who is a surgeon, said he had been ‘proud’ to use his clinical experience to ‘accelerate the digital transformation of our NHS’.

But, in his resignation letter to Sir Keir yesterday, the Labour MP for Glasgow South West said he would be unable to finish the ‘critical work’ that he had started while the UK public had ‘irretrievably lost confidence in you as Prime Minister’, due to ‘a lack of values-driven leadership at the centre’.

Blaming the Prime Minister for the Scottish National Party’s success in last week’s Holyrood elections, Dr Ahmed said: ‘This was apparent in the recent Scottish Parliament elections where on door after door your name was specifically cited as the driving reason why Labour voters of 2024 would not vote for Scottish Labour in 2026.

‘The noise created at the centre of the Government you lead, inadvertently became the midwife for the delivery of an incompetent fifth term SNP government, and one which will now inflict more division and decay on my constituents of Glasgow South West. This is an outcome that is as intolerable as it was avoidable.

‘Throughout the entirety of my surgical career, I have been guided by the principles of precision, clarity, candour and above all else an aspiration for excellence. Those are the principles that I have attempted to bring to Parliament and to my ministerial office. And it is those principles that sadly lead me to conclude that your continuation in office is wholly untenable.’

Dr Ahmed’s work in Government has included working on the Federated Data Platform, the new platform for connecting health data across the NHS. Most recently, last month, Dr Ahmed spoke on the Government’s plans for a future relationship with the current contractor on the FDP – the controversial US tech company Palantir.

At the time, Dr Ahmed told MPs the Government ‘will decide later this year’ whether to extend the contract, ahead of a review period in the contract in February 2027.

The resignation comes as today’s King’s Speech opening Parliament after recess is expected to announce upcoming legislation to enable the Single Patient Record in the NHS – with Pulse having previously revealed that this would see NHS England assume patient data controllership for extracted data from GP practices.

Dr Ahmed became the fourth minister to quit following last week’s elections, which also saw Labour lose control of the Welsh Senedd and around 1,500 council seats across England.

Sir Keir has since appointed Preet Kaur Gill, the MP for Birmingham and Edgbaston, to replace Dr Ahmed as under-secretary in the Department for Health and Social Care. She had previously served as a shadow minister for primary care between 2023 and 2024.