At least 21,000 jobs in the NHS will be cut in health trusts across England by 2028 as they struggle to meet the Labour government’s demands that NHS trusts balance their books.
Research carried out by the Unison union reveals that cuts to nursing and other clinical staff are being prepared, as well as support post reductions through freezing employment and ‘restructuring’ of the NHS to meet Labour’s demand for trust budgets to break even from this year.
These cuts were revealed by trusts responding to freedom of information requests from Unison, and come on top of the job losses at NHS England and Integrated Care Boards announced last year.
In February 2025, Labour prime minister Keir Starmer announced the abolition of NHS England by merging it with the Department of Health under plans to ‘save’ up to £800 million by making around half of the 15,300 staff at NHS England redundant along with 3,300 staff at the Department of Health.
The Unison report, Less Fit for the Future, shows that NHS providers ran up a combined deficit of over £1.1 billion last year and that the never-ending demand from the Starmer government for trusts to break even are driving cuts to NHS workers across hospitals, community and mental health services.
The drive by Labour to break up the NHS into 42 autonomous ‘Integrated Care Boards’ coupled with the demand for the wholesale destruction of jobs by forcing trusts to cover last year’s over £1.1 billion deficit, is part and parcel of the plan by Starmer and his health secretary Wes Streeting to privatise the NHS out of existence.
The health service privateer leeches are already reaping vast profits from the NHS as the Guardian newspaper reported yesterday.
Research conducted by Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) found that private companies providing services to the NHS made £1.6 billion in profits over the last two years.
This £1.6 billion in profits, made between 2023 and 2025, would have paid for 9,178 doctors or 19,428 nurses during that time, according to this report.
The CHPI identified 760 private firms providing services to the NHS and found that £2 billion of the £12 billion of contracts went to companies with owners based outside the UK in tax havens, while firms, especially those owned by private equity companies, used £353 million of their £12 billion income from the NHS to pay interest on their debts.
Labour MP Stella Creasey said: ‘It’s frankly scandalous that while patients wait for operations, taxpayer money is leaking out to offshore tax havens and the pockets of private equity companies through these excessive profits.’
What is ‘scandalous’ is the NHS is being used as a ‘cash cow’ by hedge funds while the Labour government intends to destroy thousands of doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals’ jobs because bankrupt British capitalism can no longer afford the NHS or the entire welfare state.
Streeting’s only concern is to launch a vicious attack on resident doctors over the strike to return their pay to levels of those of 2008-09, calling their demands ‘unaffordable’ and unattainable from a Labour government determined to make the working class pay for the capitalist crisis.
Unison ended its report with an appeal to the Labour government ‘to review the impact of break-even financial rules on staffing and services’.
The working class must reject craven appeals to Starmer and Streeting for ‘reviews’ in the knowledge that the existence of the NHS and all the gains of the past are under attack from a Labour government that only serves the interests of the capitalist class.
Workers must take action to defend the NHS by sacking the TUC leaders who refuse to fight this reactionary Labour government, replacing them with a leadership prepared to call a general strike to bring down Starmer’s government and bring in a workers government that will drive the privateers out of the NHS, building a socialist planned economy that provides for the needs of all.
This is the only way forward.
