12 months on, the 10-Year Health Plan is still on the launchpad (9 July 2026)

Summary

The NHS 10-Year Health Plan promised transformative change, but one year on, implementation remains slow, uneven, and lacking transparency.

So, what should we make of all this? Siva Anandaciva suggests two things in this HSJ article.

First, delivering a national plan is hard enough, but harder still while you are merging or abolishing NHS England, Integrated Care Boards, Integrated Care Partnerships, and Healthwatches. As the government’s own impact assessment for the plan wisely notes: “Making simultaneous changes to multiple layers of the NHS hierarchy creates a risk that there is insufficient capacity to accelerate change.”

Second, nearly one year after the plan was published, we have only the haziest of notions of what should have been delivered, when it should have been delivered, and who was meant to deliver it. Developing the health plan cost £3m and took eight months.

A comprehensive progress report is the least we could ask for. Because although taxpayers know exactly what we spent on the 10YHP, we are still working out exactly what we bought.