NHS to cut 8,000 jobs in ‘wokery’ crackdown

THOUSANDS of jobs will be cut from NHS arm’s-length bodies as part of a ‘war on waste and wokery’.

Amanda Pritchard, head of the Health Service, said yesterday that up to 40 per cent of posts across NHS England, Health Education England and NHS Digital will be culled as the organisations merge later this year.

The move is expected to save at least £1billion and follows a spike in recruitment during the pandemic.

It will mean up to 8,000 of the 20,000 jobs at the central bodies are cut, with voluntary redundancies offered from this autumn.

Miss Pritchard told an NHS England board meeting: ‘We need to reduce the size of our organisation, so that we are focused on enabling and supporting change and empowering systems to lead locally. We need to simplify how we work across the new organisation and how we work with the wider NHS... We also need to continue to ensure our resources are used as effectively and efficiently as possible.’

Earlier this year it emerged NHS bureaucracy doubled during the pandemic but the number of frontline workforce barely grew.

The number of people working across the Department of Health and NHS England rose from 7,883 to 14,515 since February 2020, the Policy Exchange think tank revealed.

Concerns were raised that too much taxpayer money was being spent on duplicate functions ahead of a review of leadership in the NHS by former general Sir Gordon Messenger. He was asked to stamp out ‘waste and wokery’ and ensure that ‘every pound is well spent’.