Phone glitch puts callers to the Department of Health straight through to Victoria Atkins

It is always a struggle to get anyone in a government office to pick up the phone.

But members of the public calling the Department of Health switchboard have been lucky enough to be connected to the Health Secretary herself.

Callers were put through to Victoria Atkins under a new system designed to auto-divert calls to relevant officials via Microsoft Teams.

Several were connected to the minister before officials replaced her laptop to stop this happening, Politico reported.

The embarrassing error comes after Chancellor Jeremy Hunt's Budget announcement that an extra £3.4billon would be spent on NHS productivity over five years – with the aim of ramping up digitisation and automation in a health service that until recently used fax machines.

He told MPs that the 'landmark' investment would 'modernise NHS IT systems so they're as good as the best in the world' – and lead to £35billion in savings. Ms Atkins' experience is reminiscent of ministers being prank-called in the past. 

In 2022, then defence secretary Ben Wallace was caught up in a suspected Russian hoax call after he spoke to an 'imposter' pretending to be the Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal for ten minutes.

The episode raised concerns about the ease with which rogue states could source the phone numbers of senior government officials. Last year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's number was published online in an embarrassing security breach.

And when she was prime minister, the mobile numbers for Liz Truss and 25 of her cabinet ministers were made available on the internet.

During his time in No 10 in 2021, Boris Johnson was advised to stop using his personal phone and not to access it again on security grounds after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said of the switchboard error: 'We do not comment on security matters.'