Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) integrated care boards and (b) NHS trusts have contacted his Department to discuss the potential cost of redundancies since 1 January 2025.

The Prime Minister has announced the integration of the Department and NHS England and the associated reduction in size, and NHS England has also set out separate ambitions of reducing integrated care board running costs as well as National Health Service trusts’ corporate costs. These reforms will deliver a more efficient, leaner centre, and will also free up capacity and help deliver significant savings of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, which will be reinvested into frontline services, to cut waiting times through the Government’s Plan for Change.

Clearly these reforms will have workforce implications, and we are working closely with NHS England and HM Treasury to deliver these, however we do not yet have a robust estimate of costs for 2025/26. Discussions have been with NHS England at a national level, and not with individual integrated care boards or trusts.