Health Secretary Wes Streeting delivered the warning in the wake of Keir Starmer’s announcement that NHS England – which oversees the running of the health service – will be axed
Wes Streeting says NHS is ‘addicted to overspending’
The NHS is “addicted to overspending” and assumes someone will “come along to bail them out”, the Health Secretary has said.
Wes Streeting delivered the warning in the wake of Keir Starmer’s announcement on Thursday that NHS England will be scrapped. The administrative body is being swallowed up by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), in a dramatic change to how the health service is run.
And today Mr Streeting declared there was more to come, suggesting hundreds more quangos could be at risk as part of a major overhaul. In a round of TV interviews, he said: “I can’t sugar coat the fact there will be a significant number of job losses.”
The Health Secretary told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips that integrated care boards (ICBS) – regional bodies which oversee NHS trusts – were being required to make 50% cuts “with a particular focus on management costs”.
He said: “Myself and Jim (Mackey, NHS England’s chief executive) are confronting a financial planning round for the year ahead where systems returned financial plans to us that would have involved an overspend between £5 and £6 billion before the new financial year has even begun.
“I’m afraid this speaks to the culture that I identified before the general election where the NHS is addicted to overspending, is addicted to running up routine deficits, with the assumption that someone will come along to bail them out, in a way that, by the way, local councils would never be able to do.”
Mr Streeting told the Telegraph that scrapping NHS England is “the beginning, not the end” and said he would continue “slashing bloated bureaucracy”. He said the new NHS England chair, Penny Dash, had “identified hundreds of bodies cluttering the patient safety and regulatory landscape, leaving patients and staff alike lost in a labyrinth of paperwork and frustration”.
Today he said: “I’m going after the bureaucracy, not the people who work in it. Of course, I can’t sugar coat the fact that there will be a significant number of job losses and we will want to make sure we are treating people fairly, supporting them properly through that process. And I’m not criticising them, but I’ve got to make sure the system is well set up.”
The Health Secretary denied the Government was plotting another wave of austerity, saying Chancellor Rachel Reeves had put £26billion into the NHS for the year ahead.
“It’s not cutting spending, quite the opposite,” he said. “What we’re going after I’m afraid is some of the culture and practice that’s been allowed up in the NHS, which by the way isn’t frustrating patients and taxpayers. It’s frustrating for staff working in the NHS because they can see the waste and inefficiency.”
He added: “I’m responsible for an NHS that can’t see an ambulance arrive on time. I’m responsible for an NHS where people can’t always get a GP appointment when they need one, where NHS dentistry is barely existent in parts of the country. So there are fundamental problems I need to fix.”