NHS England to cut workforce by half as Streeting restructures

NHS England will lose half its staff and a huge swathe of its senior management team as part of a brutal restructuring under its new boss.

Its workforce will shrink from 13,000 to about 6,500 as entire teams are axed to save money and avoid “duplication” with officials at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

NHS England staff said they were “in shock and awe” at the scale of the job cuts, which go far beyond the loss of 2,000 posts to save £175m announced just weeks ago.

The DHSC will also become smaller as a result of a process that will see it working much more closely from April with NHS England, though it will shed far fewer staff than the latter. The changes will give Wes Streeting, the health secretary, far more control over the organisation that is responsible for the operational performance of the health service in England.

“These changes represent the biggest reshaping of the NHS’s national architecture in more than a decade,” said Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS trusts in England.

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Source: The Guardian, 10 March 2025