Dame Diana Johnson DBE is the new pharmacy minister after officially being appointed as the new minister of state for public health and patient safety.
Johnson became a minister in the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) on July 21 but confirmation of the specific roles of the new ministers had not been announced until today.
The new pharmacy minister previously held ministerial roles in the current government, most recently in the the Department for Work and Pensions between September 6, 2025 and July 21, 2026, and in the Home Office between July 8, 2024 and September 6, 2025.
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Dame Johnson is the Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham. She had represented Hull North since May 2005, becoming “Hull’s first female MP”.
She was a parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department of Children, Schools and Families and a government whip in the 2005 to 2010 Labour government.
Johnson held front bench roles in the shadow Home Office team between 2010 and 2015, while she was named “backbencher of the year” in 2018 for her work to secure a public inquiry into the NHS contaminated blood scandal.
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The pharmacy minister also served as a commissioner on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission from 2019 to 2024 and received a Damehood for her political and charitable work in 2020.
As well as being responsible for pharmacy, Johnson will oversee:
- health improvement
- secondary prevention and screening
- health inequalities
- children’s health
- health protection
- patient safety
- neighbourhood health
- community healthcare
- general practice
This is a breaking news story, more to follow...
