NHS England still hasn’t launched a voluntary redundancy scheme, despite Labour claiming to have “abolished” the quango back in March. In response to a request from Guido’s FOI unit, the somehow-still-alive NHS England admitted:
“The voluntary redundancy scheme has not been officially opened yet, therefore no requests have been received so we are not able to estimate a total cost of severance payments associated with voluntary redundancies.”
Co-conspirators will remember the wide praise when Starmer pledged to cut around 7,000 jobs by scrapping the quango. Fast forward eight months, staffing costs have gone up, and there are no voluntary redundancies…
Meanwhile, the Treasury is reportedly blocking £1.3 billion in redundancy payments unless Wes Streeting agrees to fund higher medicine prices promised to Donald Trump. Another potemkin ‘axing’ of a quango…
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock was asked if Burnham will take Britain back into the EU:
“Yes, sure – his commitment is authentic. He really does understand from the grassroots up why restoring what I think of as normality in our continent is vital for every party economically, politically, culturally, in terms of security, and he’s able to articulate it in language that people can understand. So yeah, he is definitely”.