As a former NHS England employee I can see the merit in scrapping it. I do feel for staff though. I remember when we all found out about merger of NHSE, HEE, & NHS Digital and planned job cuts via the HSJ leak. I doubt staff had much, if any, warning before the BBC News alert pinged on their phones

I really do think headlines like this should be doing a lot more to explain what the organisation 'NHS England' actually is and that this isn't Keir Starmer scrapping the NHS in England (which is the impression it kind of gives people!)

2/2…continued doing the same work, replicating the work of the national team. This wasn’t picked up for several years until the 2023-4 restructure of NHS England. Outside of postgraduate medical and dental recruitment and education, much of its work was being done or could be done by DHSC or ICBs.

NHS England is a fairly recent innovation. Brought in by the Tories. When I worked there I was at a national team with responsibility for something that used to be done on regional level. Regional teams redeployed or made redundant apart from one region who seemed to have been missed and… 1/2