NHS England are working on a ‘plan b’ for redundancy costs following the requirement for ICBs to cut their costs by 50%.
In an NHS England board meeting last month (23 September), Sir Jim Mackey said there was a ‘tension’ about the voluntary redundancy scheme.
He said he’d had a ‘pretty long awkward conversation with Treasury colleagues trying to unlock that’.
He said if this has not managed ‘to land’ in the next couple of weeks then they will have to work on a plan b option to ‘allow our ICB colleagues to move on, similarly in NHS England’.
Sir Jim added that every ICB has a plan they can enact, but that it ‘is limited’ by the resources they have and would be ‘more of a staged process’, with benefits being less and slower than anticipated.
In the board’s financial performance update, redundancy costs were also labelled as a ‘significant risk’ to the NHS’s financial position if they are unfunded.
Suffolk ICB noted at their board meeting on 23 September that they were ‘still awaiting clarification’ from NHS England about whether the redundancy costs would be funded centrally or not.
Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes ICB said in its board meeting papers from 26 September that it ‘assumed’ funding would be released by NHS England so that the risk does not impact the ICB’s financial position. It estimated the costs associated with the redundancy and merger would be around £12m.
It’s been reported that redundancies across ICBs are estimated to cost around £1bn in total, after ICBs were told to make 50% cuts to their systems in March.
Sir Jim said in September that there had ‘never’ been a central pot of money for this, but that NHS England was trying to secure funding from the Treasury for it.
The Treasury has been approached for comment.
