British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday announced that his government is scrapping a key part of the country’s healthcare bureaucracy to bring it back under “democratic control”.
Gatekeepers News reports that the Prime Minister said: “overhauling the struggling National Health Service (NHS) is one of the Labour government’s top domestic priorities”.
At a press conference, Starmer explained that the decision to scrap the entity was in large part a matter of efficiency — a claim that matches recent reports that his government is increasingly planning to trim the public sector in an effort to turn around the UK’s public finances.
“Amongst the reasons we’re abolishing it is because of the duplication. So if you can believe it, we’ve got a communications team in NHS England, communications team in the health department of government, got a strategy team in NHS England, a strategy team in the government department.”
“If we strip that out, which is what we’re doing today, that then allows us to free up that money to put it where it needs to be, which is the front line.”
Speaking in the House of Commons shortly after Starmer’s announcement, Health Secretary Wes Streeting — who has made aggressive moves to use private healthcare capacity to help relieve the overburdened NHS — said it would take around two years to reintegrate NHS England’s functions back into the system as a whole.
“These reforms will deliver a much leaner top of the NHS, making significant savings of hundreds of millions of pounds a year,” he said.
“That money will flow down to the front line to cut waiting times faster and deliver our Plan for Change by slashing through the layers of red tape and ending the infantilisation of frontline NHS leaders.”
