Halt proposed NHS redundancies affecting 18,000 staff pending impact assessment
12,100 people signed this petition to the UK Parliament after it opened on 16 December 2025; it closed on 16 June 2026. The Government responded on 22 January 2026.
The petition
The petition's creator is not named in the Petitions site's published record. Quoted in full from the UK Parliament petitions site.
Halt proposed NHS redundancies affecting 18,000 staff pending impact assessment
Halt NHSE, CSU & ICB closures until government publishes: impact assessment on service continuity, cost-benefit analysis proving genuine savings, evidence the 10 Year Health Plan is deliverable with reduced workforce, & transition plans for services supporting NHS trusts and GPs
Up to 18k NHS staff face redundancy with no published impact assessment or cost-benefit analysis. When private companies propose mass layoffs, government intervenes - why not with the NHS? Before potentially losing expertise needed to deliver the 10 Year Health Plan, the Government needs to prove benefits to patients not consultancies and real savings. The Government risks a loss of knowledge that consultancies will cost far more to replace. We demand transparency before possibly irreversible damage takes place.
The Government's response
The Government published its response on 22 January 2026; the petitions site lists the Department of Health and Social Care as responsible. Its summary:
Initial impact assessment shows proposed cuts will deliver £1bn per annum in savings that can be channelled to the frontline. We cannot deliver NHS reform without a more efficient, streamlined centre.
The opening 382 words of the 833-word response:
Upon taking office, this Government organised the biggest national conversation about the future of the NHS in its history, with events involving over 4,000 staff and members of the public and 1.9 million visits to our Change NHS website, where 250,000 experiences and ideas for change were shared. We heard a unanimous message: no-one defends the status quo. Staff and patients are crying out for desperately needed change. Since the 2012 reorganisation of the NHS we have seen worse care for patients, at soaring costs, leaving taxpayers paying more but getting less. In 2010, we spent below the OECD average on healthcare and achieved above-average outcomes. Today we spend the average and achieve worse outcomes. The size of the centre has doubled over this same period. The NHS today accounts for 38 per cent of day-to-day Government spending – a figure projected to rise to 40 per cent by the end of the decade – crowding out investment which could tackle the wider social determinants of ill health. That is unsustainable. As Lord Darzi’s independent investigation into the NHS in England found, the NHS is in a ‘critical condition’. Public satisfaction is the lowest it has ever been, millions are waiting for treatment, and the health of the nation is deteriorating. The NHS stands at a historic crossroads and the choice is stark: continue like this, making tweaks to an increasingly unsustainable model, or take a new course and reinvent the NHS through transformational change that will guarantee its sustainability for generations to come.
This Government is serious about delivering this transformational change for staff and patients through the ambitious shifts set out in the 10 Year Health Plan. A key component of this change is a more efficient and effective centre. We will simplify the NHS and remove layers of unnecessary bureaucracy, which will allow us to reinvest more into the frontline, so patients receive safe, timely care and are heard and listened to. This change is no reflection on the tireless work of professionals across the centre who have had to battle against this red tape for too long – the new leaner, more efficient, more focused centre we are building will not just work better for patients and NHS staff, but for employees of the new centre as well.
Read the full response on the petitions site.
Source and receipt
- https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions.json?state=with_response&page=8UK Parliament Petitions API · read 2026-10-15 · SHA-256
af5f39fd778116af… - The petition on petition.parliament.uk
The petition's words are its creator's and the response is the Government's; this site quotes both and gives no view on either. Signature counts can still change while a petition is open. To report an error, send a correction request.