Health secretary says the scrapping of NHS England is ‘beginning, not end’ of bid to slash ‘bloated bureaucracy’

The health secretary has declared that scrapping NHS England is “the beginning, not the end” and has vowed to continue “slashing bloated bureaucracy”.

Wes Streeting suggested hundreds more quangos could be in the line of fire after the prime minister announced this week the end of the body overseeing the health service in England.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Streeting said: “The abolition of NHS England – the world’s largest quango – is the beginning, not the end.

“Patients and staff alike can see the inefficiency and waste in the health service. My team and I are going through budgets line by line, with a relentless focus on slashing bloated bureaucracy.”

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

But on Thursday, Keir Starmer announced this would come to an end as he unexpectedly revealed the government would abolish NHS England in an effort to avoid “duplication”.

In his Sunday Telegraph article, Streeting suggested more was to come, saying 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”.

The move towards scrapping NHS England and other health-related quangos marks a change in direction for Streeting, who in January 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 in the Telegraph article, Streeting said he had 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.”

The government expects scrapping NHS England will take two years and save “hundreds of millions of pounds” that can be spent on frontline services.

But during the week, Downing Street would not be drawn on how many people were facing redundancy as a result of the changes.

The Guardian reported on Friday that the jobs cull from the government’s radical restructuring of the NHS will be at least twice as big as previously thought.

The staff shakeout caused by NHS England’s abolition and unprecedented cost-cutting elsewhere will mean the number of lost posts will soar from the 10,000 expected to between 20,000 and 30,000.

Many thousands more people who work for the NHS’s 42 integrated care boards (ICBs) in England will see their roles axed, as well as the 10,000 working for NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) who have already been earmarked to go.