23rd October 2025

Subcos: Campaign victory!
A subco is where an NHS trust creates a wholly owned subsidiary company to avoid tax and to threaten staff terms and conditions. The government announced that will now only be approved “in a limited number of circumstances, and only when there is clear union support”. In effect, never.

Who pays for NHSE redundancies?
The Chancellor is resisting demands from Streeting to use more than £1 billion from the Treasury’s reserve to fund redundancy payments when NHS England is scrapped. The Treasury has declined his request for a loan to pay off staff.

Maternity crisis: How many inquiries does it take?
There’s the Shropshire inquiry, the East Kent inquiry, the Leeds inquiry, now there’s the 14 trusts inquiry. The NHS is facing an enormous £27 billion bill for maternity failings. We, and they, know it’s underfunding and the resulting collapse of staff morale caused by understaffing and bullying management that’s the problem.

10 YP: Alternatives to private finance
The 10-Year Health Plan will set up to 300 “neighbourhood health hubs”. Trapped by their own borrowing rules, ministers will resort to private finance to fund them, despite National Audit Office concluding that PF2 (the revised version of PFI) is two to three times more expensive than public finance. Here are sensible alternatives.