A former UK life sciences minister has described his "horror" after being asked to digitise the NHS with a £4.2bn fund and "no delivery plan" on how to create a "paperless" service.

Speaking at the annual Conservative party conference, MP George Freeman said he had not taken part in any spending talks at the time and was handed the new money, announced in February 2016, in a deal done between former health secretary Jeremy Hunt and former chancellor George Osborne.

According to the BBC, Freeman told a fringe meeting at the conference in Birmingham: “The Treasury should have said you are not even having a penny until we have got your delivery plan and until we know that you are not just going to buy a system off the shelf from some big company.”

As life sciences minister, Freeman was tasked with the digitisation of the NHS and driving uptake of innovation, among others, in a role that spanned both the Department of Health (now Department of Health and Social Care) and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (that later merged with the Department of Energy and Climate Change to create the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy), which he left in the summer of 2016 after being appointed as chair of the Prime Minister’s Policy Board – a position he then resigned from in November 2017.

Freeman said civil servants were asked to figure out how the £4.2bn fund would be spent after it was allocated and warned that "top down solutions" would not work, instead pushing for "lots of local digital solutions" designed by clinicians, explaining that the IT industry would identify how systems would then "talk to each other", the BBC said. 

A review led by Professor Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, published in 2016, asked for the government's flagpship “paperless by 2020” target to be "discarded as unrealistic". 

“The goal is not paperless – it is improvement, facilitated by having information where it’s needed, when it’s needed. Regarding timing, we have set 2023 as a reasonable goal to have robust clinical information systems implemented in all NHS trusts, along with a high degree of interoperability,” it said at the time.