Wes Streeting warns NHS is ‘addicted to overspending’ as up to 10,000 jobs at risk

The National Health Service is “addicted to overspending”, Wes Streeting has said, indicating that the abolition of NHS England was just the beginning of efficiencies being made to the health service.

The health secretary also admitted there would be significant job losses, adding that he was “genuinely sorry” that people working for NHS England would be “deeply anxious” about their jobs.

It comes after Sir Keir Starmer announced the abolition of NHS England on Thursday, as part of an attempt to cut bureaucracy and save money – with up to 10,000 jobs at risk.

Mr Streeting has since suggested hundreds more quangos could be in the firing line, warning that scrapping NHS England was “the beginning, not the end”.

Ministers said the plans would help deliver savings of hundreds of millions of pounds every year, which would be used to cut waiting times by slashing red tape to help speed up improvements in the health service.

Speaking to Sky News, the health secretary said that integrated care boards were being required to make 50 per cent cuts “with a particular focus on management costs”.

“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 £6bn before the new financial year has even begun,” Mr Streeting said.

“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.”

While the health secretary was unable to say which other health quangos might be scrapped, he admitted there will be further job losses as ministers attempt to simplify a complicated system.

Mr Streeting told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “I’m going after the bureaucracy, not the people who work in it.

“Of course, I can’t sugarcoat 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.”

Asked which other organisations could be abolished after NHS England, he said: “There is an overregulation. Frontline NHS leaders are complaining to me that they could deliver better care for patients and they could deliver better value for taxpayers, but they are often receiving a barrage of commands – sometimes contradictory and competing demands – from the Department for Health, from NHS England and from the wide range of regulators in this space.

“If we can simplify this, it’s a complicated system, it’s a complex system, but if we can simplify as much as we can, and do away with this idea that everything in a system this vast, this big, can be commanded and controlled with levers being pulled in Westminster and Whitehall, we will set up the NHS to succeed.”

Mr Streeting also said he was “genuinely sorry” that people working for NHS England would be “deeply anxious” about their jobs.

“Many of the people who work in the NHS agree entirely with the criticism I’ve made about the layers of bureaucracy… but will there be a lot of people this weekend who are deeply anxious about their futures? Absolutely.

“And I’m genuinely sorry about that because we don’t want them to be in that position, but I’ve got to make the changes that are necessary.”

Announcing the scrapping of NHS England during a speech in Kingston upon Hull last week, Sir Keir said the reforms would “put the NHS back at the heart of government where it belongs, freeing it to focus on patients, less bureaucracy, with more money for nurses.”

And he added that it was far from the only “tough choice” he would make, promising: “In this era, they will keep on coming.”

NHS England has managed the health service since 2012, when it was established to cut down on political interference in the NHS – something Mr Streeting described as an act of “backside-covering” to avoid blame for failures.

Writing in the Telegraph, the health secretary suggested more was to come, saying 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”.

The move towards scrapping NHS England and other health-related quangos marks a change in direction for Mr Streeting, who in January of this year said he would not embark upon a reorganisation of the NHS.

He told the Health Service Journal he could spend “a hell of a lot of time” on reorganisation “and not make a single difference to the patient interest”, saying instead he would focus on trying to “eliminate waste and duplication”.

But he has since said he heard former Conservative health ministers bemoan not abolishing NHS England, adding: “If we hadn’t acted this week, the transformational reform the NHS needs wouldn’t have been possible.”