Ministers savaged over NHS reform cost

Unison accused Ministers of “wasting money” after the Health Secretary admitted that implementing the Health and Social Care Act is now expected to cost between £1.5bn and £1.6bn.

The cost of introducing the reforms was initially thought to be between £1.2bn and £1.3bn, Jeremy Hunt said in a written statement to the House of Commons.

The revelation came as the Department of Health’s (DH) annual accounts for 2011-12 showed that 28,000 NHS jobs were lost in just one year.

Employee numbers fell by 2.55 per cent between 2011 and 2012, from 1,125,877 to 1,097,180.

A Unison spokeswoman said: “This is an absolute disgrace. Taxpayers have every right to be furious that Government is wasting more money on these disastrous, unnecessary changes to our NHS instead of on treating patients and employing more nurses.

“£1.5bn to £1.6bn is an obscene amount of money to spend on a reorganisation and the Government should not be spending this money when the NHS is cutting back on patient care, on staff and on their pay and conditions.”

Unite’s head of health Rachael Maskell added: “Unite has repeatedly warned that the privatisation of the NHS would be a costly fiasco – and now the chickens have come home to roost to expose the folly of the Government’s so-called reforms.

“The money spent on the reorganisation of the NHS for the benefit of private healthcare companies, whose priority is profits for shareholders at the expense of patient care, would have been better spent on frontline services for the sick and the ill.

“Every day we are seeing the cost of NHS privatisation, with nurses losing their jobs and waiting lists increasing. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt needs to act now to reverse this destruction of the NHS.”