One hundred and eighty years after the first fax machines started grinding out messages, three NHS trusts in England are still using the technology.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting had made it his personal mission to banish the fax, pledging to Radio 5 Live in October 2024 that he would phase them out of the health service within a year.
Now he has returned with an update – and it is not quite mission accomplished.
“I’m happy to report that having gone away and scoured the NHS for evidence of fax machines being put to use, of the 205 NHS trusts we have in the country, only three are now using fax machines for everyday use, which are Leeds, Birmingham and Shrewsbury and Telford,” Streeting said.
“Now, in the case of Leeds and Birmingham, they have a plan to phase them out entirely in the next 12 months.
“Shrewsbury and Telford’s going to take them a bit longer.”
Streeting told me he was now working with the three institutions – Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust – to move into the 20th century, if not the 21st.
But he added: “I decided that having been told by these trusts that were I to politically order them to cease use I would cause them some quite significant operational headaches, I decided to do the right thing and explain to you that there are still three trusts using fax machines.”
Fax machines – formally known as facsimile machines – used to be a familiar fixture in offices as well as schools, hospitals and police stations across the country.
They worked by allowing users to feed a page of text or images into a machine, which would be sent over a telephone line and printed out for the recipient.
The technology was overtaken by email in the early 2000s, but persisted in some offices, particularly in the health service.
Back in December 2018, Conservative health secretary Matt Hancock banned the NHS from buying new faxes and ordered a complete phase-out by April 2020.
His pledge to “axe the fax” was repeated by his six successors in the role, including Streeting. Yet still they clung on.
In 2024, Streeting committed on 5 Live to return within a year with an update on his mission to eradicate what he once described as “antique technology”.
“One is one too many,” he said. “I’ll come back in a year’s time and tell you where I’ve got to.”
Now he has revealed the scale of the problem.
“Obviously they’re not in heavy use, but they will be sending, because some of these trusts are multi-sites, some of them department-to-department, so it’s like occasional use of things like that.”
Elsewhere a number of trusts have fax machines in storage as an emergency back up in the event of other forms of communication going down.
Streeting added: “Across the NHS, what is interesting is that where we’ve still got fax machines, they’re in cupboards.
“The other bit of pushback I got from the system was we still need some fax machines for a world of cyber security and cyber attacks, because if there is a system problem, we need to be able to whip them out of the cupboard so we can still communicate.
“And again, I thought that was a reasonable explanation.
“But it does mean that having first made this pledge six health secretaries ago.
“If you’re listening, Matt Hancock, your pledge has finally been fulfilled by the NHS, as far as I’m concerned.”
Listen to Matt Chorley live from Westminster, weekdays from 2pm on Radio 5 Live.
