Integrated Care Board cuts: A message of support for our NHS colleagues

Last week, the Prime Minister announced that NHS England, the administrative body responsible for delivering health services, setting out funding and agreeing priorities for the NHS across the country, will be abolished.  

Alongside this, and perhaps most relevant to our VCFSE organisations and NHS partners across the North West, Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) have been ordered to cut their running costs by 50 per cent in the next six months with provider trusts also told to cut their corporate service budgets back to pre-pandemic levels. 

Citing a need to “liberate” NHS staff and leaders from over regulation and bureaucracy, these changes will see the NHS “taken back into direct government control” within the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). Keir Starmer, in his speech in East Yorkshire, was critical of the systematic duplication that has evolved since the establishment of NHS England, with the Government expecting around 50 per cent of jobs at both NHS England and DHSC to be cut in an attempt to streamline health and care planning and provision and redeploy savings to frontline services. 

The Government are wasting no time with this latest announcement, with work beginning immediately to transfer functions to DHSC with an aim for the transition to be complete within a 2-year timeline. There is uncertainty around what this news means in terms of the recent publication of various policy announcements regarding NHS priorities and for the long awaited NHS 10 year plan. It is also unclear at this stage what 50 per cent cuts to ICB running costs will look like, particularly as many ICBs are already in financial deficit, with some concerns raised that reforming ways of working could impact on place-based teams and frontline services.  

We understand that this is an extremely concerning and demoralising time for many health and care staff across the country, and here at VSNW we want to offer our solidarity and support to our NHS colleagues and partners across the North West. 

It is easy to see these figures as that, just figures, but behind these numbers and percentages are hardworking and passionate people who are dedicated to delivering high quality care to our communities in the face of increasingly difficult circumstances. Communities in which their families, friends, colleagues and they themselves live and receive health care. 

Whilst we wait to see the impact of these proposed cuts locally, and indeed on the VCFSE sector, we will continue to support our health and care partners across the North West to navigate this challenge to continue to provide high-quality services for our communities.  

At VSNW we are committed to supporting improved, integrated, prevention-driven community and neighbourhood delivery concurrently with the three NHS shifts (hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention).  

For further information on this announcement, NHS Confederation have produced a briefing which can be found here: https://www.nhsconfed.org/publications/abolishing-nhs-england-what-you-need-know