Taxpayers have forked out at least £4.95 million in golden goodbyes for senior civil servants in the NHS. According to health minister Karin Smyth, in the year 2024-25 there were 33 exit payment cases disclosed by integrated care boards which were of a value of £150,001 or more. Eye-watering…
For context, there are currently 42 NHS Integrated Care Boards responsible for carving up NHS budgets and commissioning services for local areas. Meanwhile, as of November last year, NHS England has not opened a voluntary redundancy scheme and staffing costs have actually gone up since Starmer promised to ‘abolish’ the quango last March. The Hippocratic Oath doesn’t apply to quangos you’ve promised to abolish, by the way…
Speaking at an IPPR think tank event in London, the Health Secretary compared striking junior doctors to mutinous sailors.
“I feel like we’ve turned the ship, the boat’s going in the right direction, except some of the crew are trying to row in one direction while the rest of us are going in the other. You can’t make progress that way. We are seeing an improving NHS, and we’ve seen improvement despite resident doctors’ strikes, but the fact is, performance would have been better and there would have been more money to invest in staff and services if the BMA hadn’t been undertaking the strike action.”