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Top health administrators to lose jobs

The Department of Health in London and the NHS Executive in Leeds are to shed 700 civil servants by March 1997, it was announced last week. The cuts, amounting to one in five posts, are a consequence both of restructuring and a purge of civil service jobs driven by the chancellor of the exchequer, Kenneth Clarke. Other Whitehall departments are making similar cuts.

The rundown in the Department of Health has already begun in the sense of early retirements and posts being frozen for most of this year. Last month a letter circulated to staff produced 200 applications for early retirement. The department hopes to achieve the cuts voluntarily, but does not rule out compulsory redundancies. Some will be at the top levels and will cost several million pounds in redundancy payments.

The losses are split between 500 in London and 200 in Leeds, where the NHS Executive set up its headquarters at Quarry House less than two years ago by moving some 800 staff from London. The relatively heavier cuts proposed in Leeds have caused a feeling, as one employee put it, that "they have taken us up here to be shot." Exactly where the cuts will fall is not yet known, though the section in Leeds dealing with performance management is to be drastically reduced. Its main role was to monitor the quality of performance in the regions. Critics say that the reductions will exacerbate shortcomings in health and community care services, though the government argues that they reflect the benefit of the reforms in devolving work to a local level. The new cuts are on top of 1500 job losses that have already taken place in NHS regions, which have been cut from 14 to eight. A further 1700 posts are expected to go next year as a result of forthcoming legislation.

The National Union of Civil and Public Servants said that the public would be rightly worried that cuts on such a scale would endanger the coordination and development of health policy.

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