Now NHS cuts have been put on ice

Thursday, September 03, 2009

The NHS workforce in England won't be slashed by 10 per cent over the next five years, the Department of Health has said, despite being advised to do so by external consultants McKinsey and Company.

The idea was to cut 137,000 clinical and administration posts to save around £20bn by 2014 but health minister Mike O'Brien said: "Ministers have rejected the suggested proposals in the McKinsey report and there are no plans to adopt these proposals in the future. The government does not believe the right answer to improving the NHS now or in the future is to cut the NHS workforce. In core frontline services like maternity, nursing and primary care we need more staff rather than fewer."

Dr Mark Porter of the British Medical Association agreed, saying: "If implemented, these short-sighted proposals would have been disastrous. We welcome the commitment given by the government that it has rejected them and does not see workforce cuts as the solution to the challenges facing the NHS."

However, the Tory shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said the government didn't appear to know what it was doing.

"One minute Labour ministers are going out telling the public they're going to protect the NHS," he said, "the next they're spending taxpayers' money on management consultants who are planning to cut 10 per cent of the staff of the NHS."

Sir Gerry Robinson told the BBC he was not impressed with the DH spending money on a report that it then rejects for purely political reasons. "You wonder at the mindset behind getting a report like that and then saying because it is not politically acceptable, we are not actually going to do anything with it," he said. "It's infuriating, the way the government handles the NHS and the way the opposition handles the game that gets played."