NHS "should sack 137,000 staff"

The government has rejected advice from management consultants to cut

the NHS workforce in England by 10% over the next five years, it has been

revealed today.

McKinsey & Company, management consultants commissioned by the

government to look into "efficiency savings", proposed the jobs cull as a

means of saving £20billion by 2014. If implemented, job cuts would

affect not only management and administration staff, but also frontline

medical and nursing staff.

The report was meant to be confidential, but its contents were leaked to

the Health Service Journal. its recommendations are detailed and urge

the government to reduce medical school places, implement a

recruitment freeze and facilitate an "early retirement" scheme to

encourage older NHS staff to make way for "new talent".

The government has immediately distanced itself from the report's recommendations. A spokesman said: "The government does not believe the right answer to improving the NHS now or in the future is to cut the NHS workforce. In core frontline services like maternity, nursing and primary care we need more staff rather than fewer." Conservative Health Spokesman Andrew Lansley, whose party last week pledged to increase the NHS budget, was keen to attribute the proposed cuts to Labour: "it is extraordinary that Labour plan to take an axe to the hospital budget rather than to the bloated health bureaucracy. Only a fifth of job cuts would be within the bureaucracy, meaning the vast majority to go would be front-line NHS staff," he said.

UNISON and the BMA have also expressed concern at the report, arguing that "the Government would be right to question the wisdom of putting these proposals into action" and labelling the proposals "short-sighted".

Andrew Billson-Page, director of the NHS Improvement Society, admits that there is a need for a responsble discussion on funding the NHS. "There's no point in avoiding the issue", he explained. "There is no doubt that this is a hot potato that no politician wants to touch, but the truth is that there is a very real need for savings to be made. The NHS has to become more efficient, and we need to talk about how this can realistically be achieved. However, NHS reform has to be responsibly considered - it is simply wrong to suggest, as these overpaid management consultants clearly do, that the NHS can be made effective through cutting huge numbers of vital frontline staff.

"This report is blinkered, focusing only on the financial. It is not remotely clinically-driven. If it was ever to be implemented, there is no doubt in my mind it would be to the detriment of patient care. There should be more frontline staff in the NHS, not fewer."