Listen Up

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

What does NHS England do? And why is it being abolished?



The government has announced NHS England will be abolished to "cut bureaucracy" and reform how the National Health Service is run.

The changes will not impact anyone's access to the NHS - it will still be free at the point of use and cover all the services it does already.

Around 9,000 administrative roles are being cut at NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care as part of the changes - amounting to roughly half of all roles at the two organizations.


The UK and EU are far ahead of the United States delivering affordable healthcare. The United States struggles with a complex set of irregular rule depending upon the insurers, which have a wide range of goals.


What does NHS England do?

NHS England is the administrative body that manages how health services up and down the country are run. It is made up primarily of managers and officials, not the doctors and nurses providing care in hospitals.

The government provides it with money and tells it what its priorities are for the health service - for example, that might be cutting waiting times or improving cancer survival rates.

NHS England's role is to funnel the money it is given into different parts of the health service and work out how to juggle resources in order to bring about the change the government wants to see.

Did this decision come out of the blue?

Within the NHS and Westminster, the writing has been on the wall for NHS England for some months.

Even in the latter years of the Tory government, health ministers expressed frustration that they were not in charge of the day-to-day running of the health service.

When Labour came into power, it was clear Health Secretary Wes Streeting wanted more control of the NHS and saw a lot of duplication and bureaucracy.

NHS England's chief executive Amanda Pritchard recently said she would step down at the end of the March and a number of her senior leadership team have followed suit.

In that respect, it was clear there was going to be significant reform - but this is as big a change as you could possibly get at the heart of the NHS management structure.

What is a 'quango' - and why do ministers think 'bureaucracy' is a problem?

These are two words we have heard the government use a lot when setting out why it is scrapping NHS England and bringing the health service under closer government control.

In this context, bureaucracy is a stand-in word for a system that is particularly complicated, or requires excessive amounts of administration, paperwork, regulations or layers of management.

Starmer made it clear he thinks this sort of admin is getting in the way of delivering health services.

We also heard him describe NHS England as the "world's largest quango" - a term that stands for Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation.















What does NHS England do? And why is it being abolished?

No comments: