By Andy Ford, NHS technician, Unite member
Nothing better showed the stupidity and emptiness of Starmer, Streeting and Reeves’ ‘commitment’ to the NHS than the bombshell announcement of the abolition of NHS England in March 2025.
Starmer was all dressed up, as he often is, in Hi-Vis, as he made a speech at the Dettol research centre in Hull. The centre piece was a pledge to “slash bureaucracy” and get rid of “pen pushers” and spend the money on the “front line”. It was a pathetic attempt to emulate Elon Musk and his chainsaw.
Of course, health workers hold no brief for NHS England as an institution. It was set up more or less as a human shield for Andrew Lansley, then the Tory Secretary of State for Health. The responsibility for the health of the population was transferred from the Secretary of State to the new institution, allowing Lansley to walk away from any problems in the NHS.
It was supposed to be ‘independent’, with a board, a Chair and a CEO and everything, but it then proceeded to follow every twist and turn of government policy, both Conservative and Labour. It also became a repository of various health ministers’ pet ideas – Monitor, NHSx, NHS Digital and NHS Improvement – as they successively crashed and burned.
But although the institution was flawed from the outset, the people working in it were not. They are senior people, often experts in specialised fields, with decades of experience in the NHS. Overnight, Keir Starmer callously plunged them into uncertainty.
First, they were going to be made redundant. Then the Treasury refused to cover the redundancy costs, and now thousands are leaving on redundancy or else its rip-off variant, MARS (Mutually Agreed Resignation Scheme). As the months have gone by, it has become very clear that there never a plan for what would happen to the people, or the services they provided.
Even now, services are being closed and scaled back, with no idea of who is going to provide them, or even IF they will be provided, in the future. It’s a mess. A mess that will cost over £1bn.
A plan only for newspaper headlines
And for what? There was no plan for the services, just a plan to get a day or so of newspaper headlines. And Elon Musk’s ‘war on waste’ was never popular anyway, not really, not with real people. The only people who liked it were the sort of creeps that sell their souls every day to fill the pages of billionaire-owned newspapers. That was Starmer’s target audience when he was waffling in Hull.
NHS England is not a nest of “wasteful pen pushers” as the Daily Mail and Keir Starmer would have you believe. It covers national vaccination programmes, it arranges provision of specialised health services, it monitors targets like waiting times and A&E waits, and it promotes digital initiatives in cancer care and mental health.
The institution itself, with its toytown Board, Chief Executive and Chair, could have been abolished, but the people in it, and the services they provide should have been transferred either downwards to the regional commissioning boards, or upwards to the Department of Health. But that would have taken a bit of thought, and Keir Starmer would have missed a few days headlines in the Tory press.
Andy Ford is an NHS technician standing for the NEC of Unite in the Health sector. His election statement and other articles by him can be found on his website, here.
