Senior NHS leaders have been accused of “remarkable” complacency and have run “out of ideas” to fix the UK’s broken health service as overspending doubled to £1.4bn last year.
In a damning new report published today (29th January, 2025) on the UK government website, MPs warned that a disregard for basic financial planning was hampering the health service’s ability to deliver for patients.
Although ministers have pledged to build an NHS “fit for the future”, the powerful Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said officials did not seem to have the “ideas, or the drive, to match the level of change required, despite this being precisely the moment where such thinking is vital”.
In a sign of the current state of the NHS, the health secretary Wes Streeting MP earlier this month said he could not rule out patients still being treated in hospital corridors next winter.
The chairman of the committee, Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, said:
The current government has told the public that the NHS is broken. This will not come as news to NHS patients, nor to its hard-working staff across the country.” But, he said, the committee was “aghast” at the “complacency displayed”.
His committee also hit out at officials from the Department of Health and NHS England for tending to blame the NHS’s poor financial position on factors like the ‘COVID pandemic, inflation and industrial action’. While these undoubtedly have played their part, there are also well-known issues that are within officials’ control”.
The report found that despite doing 15 per cent more than before the pandemic, the NHS is actually less productive. Despite employing 19 per cent more staff it is also only seeing 14 per cent more patients.
