Department of Health and Social Care: Staff

(asked on 22nd January 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what evidence base was used to inform the reduction of 600 staff in his Department in 2016-17.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 30th January 2018

The 2015 Spending Review announced that the Department would be required to reduce its core running costs by 30% by the financial year 2019-20.

This announcement, combined with the impact of changes to the way the Department operated with its arm’s length bodies following the implementation of the Health and Social Care Act (2012), led to a review of the Department’s role, purpose and priorities. The outcome of this review was the establishment of a change programme which was launched in February 2016 as ‘Our Plan for Change: the Department of Health in 2020’. The primary focus of this plan and its supporting programme was on ensuring the Department could meet the reduced costs target by 2019-20 but it also set out how the Department would stringently reprioritise its resources and ensure staff with the necessary skills and capability could be retained to meet these challenges in a much smaller organisation in the future.

An important element of the programme was therefore a restructuring exercise which would help to deliver target savings as well as ensure that the Department retained staff with the right capability and flexibility to be posted to areas of work that would fully support its new priorities. The Plan for Change set out a proposal to develop a new structure for the Department of about 1,300 to 1,400 posts which would be a reduction of between 600 and 700 posts from the baseline of 2,000 posts.

The outcome of the prioritisation exercise and proposed structure was shared with staff at the end of summer 2016 so they could easily see the types of roles needed in the future and how they would be assessed should they decide to compete for one of the roles remaining in the Department. The Department undertook work with its heads of professions to help determine the precise professional skills and capabilities needed in the future as well as applying criteria from the Civil Service core competency framework.

As a first step towards achieving these target reductions the Department launched a voluntary exit scheme in September 2016. The newly defined and rigorous assessments of capability were applied to the selection of staff, both to this voluntary exit scheme and to the subsequent selection process for staff who eventually competed for roles in the new structures.

The restructuring process was completed by February 2017 with majority of the reduction in posts being achieved through voluntary exits.

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