The government body at the heart of the UK’s response to Covid will be spared the axe in Keir Starmer’s “bonfire of the quangos”.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has warned that the abolition of NHS England is only the start of a war on wasteful regulators and agencies he says are “cluttering” the health system.
But the UK Health Security Agency, which oversees public health in England, will not be scrapped, The i Paper understands.
The UKHSA was created in 2021 to replace Public Health England after criticism of the latter’s response to the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.
It monitors levels of infections and disease and is also responsible for biosecurity and liaising with Britain’s life sciences sector, including planning vaccine programmes for a possible future pandemic.
On Sunday Streeting warned there would be “far more change to come” in the government’s war on bureaucracy and red tape after the surprise axing of NHS England last week.
Writing in the Telegraph, the minister said there was “no time to waste” in cutting organisations from the health and care sector, and vowed to take on “vested interests” in the NHS and unions.
Penny Dash, who will oversee the two-year abolition of NHS England as its chairman, has conducted a review of health service bureaucracy and has “identified hundreds of bodies cluttering the patient safety and regulatory landscape, leaving patients and staff alike lost in a labyrinth of paperwork and frustration”, Streeting wrote.
The merging of NHS England staff into the Department of Health will cost around 10,000 jobs.
On Sunday Streeting apologised for the “significant” job losses, telling Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that many in the NHS would agree with his criticisms of the “layers of bureaucracy” and “duplication” between his department and NHS England.
But he added: “They would all agree with that, but will there be a lot of people this weekend who are deeply anxious about their futures? Absolutely.
“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.”
Streeting declined to say which other health service regulators could be abolished.
He told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: “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.
“I’m not criticising them, but I’ve got to make sure the system is well set up.”
Sir James Mackey, the new interim NHS England chief executive, has written to integrated care boards in England asking them to cut costs by 50 per cent, as their spending plans were already £5 or £6 billion over budget even before the start of the new financial year.
square NHS Streeting risks pay row with frontline staff after axeing NHS England
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Streeting added: “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.”
Mackey told Radio 4’s The World This Weekend there was a risk of disruption in the health service as NHS England is abolished.
Streeting also admitted that the changes would see disruption and some up-front costs in the short-term. These are expected to include redundancy payments for thousands of departing staff.
Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman Helen Morgan said: “The Health Secretary is right that the NHS is broken and in need of major reform after years of Conservative failure. The focus must now be on ensuring that scrapping NHS England, and any further cuts, do not have negative impacts on the quality of care for patients.
“The Government must also take the same sense of urgency shown here to social care, and complete their review by the end of the year rather than continuing to kick the can down the road.”
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