Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions his Department has had with Integrated Care Boards on the source of funding for redundancy packages resulting from the abolition of NHS England.

Following the Prime Minister’s announcement of the abolition of NHS England, we are clear about the need for a smaller centre, as well as scaling back integrated care board running costs and National Health Service provider corporate costs in order to reduce waste and bureaucracy in the NHS.

Funding arrangements have been agreed with His Majesty’s Treasury to enable redundancies to be funded within the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC’s) Spending Review settlement. £860 million of planned resource funding has been re-profiled from later to earlier years of DHSC’s Spending Review settlement. This will enable DHSC to continue making progress towards halving headcount across DHSC and NHS England. This will unlock savings of £1 billion a year by the end of the Parliament, equivalent to the cost of over 115,000 extra hip and knee operations.