- Conference
- 2025 National Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 24 March 2025
- Decision
- Carried
Health Conference notes with concern that:
• Without consulting with staff, service users or the general public, the government suddenly announced on 13th March that NHS England (NHSE) will be abolished. The Prime Minister stated that this would “bring management of the NHS back into democratic control”. Yet we have no control over the changes to our NHS, including 50% cuts in the operating costs of all 42 Integrated Care Systems in England and £6billion in cuts to NHS Trusts’ budgets. NHS staff face uncertainty about the jobs they do and the services they provide. People waiting to see a GP or consultant or to have a diagnostic test or an operation cannot be sure that this upheaval will improve their treatment.
• The future of the functions and work done by bodies such as Health Education England, NHS Digital and NHS Improvement – which were previously transferred to or merged with NHSE – remains unclear.
• NHSE costs about £2 billion a year. Its abolition will do very little to fill the deficit in funding for the NHS (estimated to be between £30 to £40 billion) to meet the existing and rising need for health care and treatment, to fill over 120,000 vacancies, to repair and rebuild hospitals and primary care facilities.
• The real purpose of abolishing NHSE is to give the government greater control of its agenda to “reform” the NHS.
• As an arm’s length body, NHSE was not directly controlled by the Secretary of State for Health. Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Social Care, DHSC, appears to have struggled to maintain its supposed strategic role but in practice often mirrored the work of NHSE, leading to justifiable accusations of unnecessary duplication. Direct control and accountability will revert to the Secretary of State, Wes Streeting, who has enthusiastically promoted the use of the private healthcare sector and announced up to 10,000 NHS job cuts.
• The Chair of the DHSC Board is the former Secretary of State for Health under Tony Blair’s government, Alan Milburn, who oversaw the massive increase in private healthcare taking over NHS services, promoted the controversial Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and introduced Foundation Trusts. He will be in a powerful position overseeing the ‘merger’ of the two organisations, despite his extensive private healthcare interests.
• NHSE was set up by the infamous Lansley 2012 Health and Care Act. It significantly increased the privatisation of NHS functions and services opened up by the Blair/Brown government. By enforcing competition between the NHS and the private healthcare sector to provide NHS services, it has effectively promoted the private healthcare sector. As the strategic controller of finance and priorities for local commissioning bodies, it has overseen extensive outsourcing of NHS functions and clinical and non-clinical services.
• Any reorganisation, however necessary, inevitably carries unnecessary costs, such as: loss of expertise and collective ‘memory’, worthwhile projects being stalled or curtailed, lower staff morale, increased staff sickness especially from stress, redundancy payments.
In the light of this, this Health conference calls on the Health Service Group Executive to:
1. Raise all these concerns with the government.
2. Call for proper consultation with staff through their trade unions over any changes to their employer, their work, the services they provide, and wherever possible to arrange for redeployment of staff to other NHS jobs rather than redundancy.
3. Call for any savings arising from abolishing NHSE and transferring functions to the DHSC to be used directly to fund NHS staff and services.
4. Call for increased funding for NHS so as to cut the deficit facing Integrated Care Systems and NHS Trusts, and to rebuild capacity to meet the population’s health needs within the whole NHS.
5. Call for and insist that NHS services – clinical and non-clinical – are provided by the NHS and not outsourced to the private sector.
6. Produce materials for members about this issue.
7. As much as possible, work with other trade unions, organisations and campaigns supporting and defending the NHS to support these demands such as, Keep Our NHS Public, the Socialist Health Association, We Own It.