
NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin agrees three-year plan to cut £260m
An NHS trust has agreed a three-year plan to cut up to £260m from its budget and break even.Under the plan, NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin aims to make total 'efficiencies' of £95.5m this year, £80.6m in 2026/27 and £84.5m in 2027/28.It includes cutting £30m from the £312m project to reorganise services between Shrewsbury and Telford, and also cutting £37.5m from urgent and emergency care.There is a target of saving a further £20m from "non-clinical" back office roles, replacing agency, reducing vacancies, sickness, turnover and unavailability.
Speaking at a board meeting on Wednesday, chief finance officer Claire Skidmore said: "We have to return to a stable financial position."But she said the health system had "made great strides" recently and added: "We have a much clearer view of what has been driving our deficit and also what we can do to address that."Her report looked at ways of reducing the need for hospital treatment, including more care at home or in the community.
This news was gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service which covers councils and other public service organisations.
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Telegraph
26 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Opposing reforms that are a step in the right direction is bad politics
What do you do as a parliamentary opposition when the Government is doing something you know you should support? The Conservative Party has faced this issue twice this week. The first is on Labour's feeble attempt to slow the increase (not make a cut) in health-related welfare spending. How that will play out is unresolved as I write. Kemi Badenoch recognises the reputational risks of voting against, so she has made an offer to back Sir Keir Starmer – but on conditions: further spending cuts and no tax increases this autumn. It's clever tactically. Starmer clearly can't accept the conditions. And his refusal allows a vote against the Government and, potentially, the death of a flagship Bill. That's the job of an opposition, isn't it? Well maybe. Yes, it certainly makes things awkward for Starmer. But it makes things awkward for the Tories too. For a political party, principles are as important as tactics, especially perhaps if you are trying to reinvent yourselves in the public mind after the political mush of the last 14 years. Sometimes it's possible to be too tactical, too clever. The fact is the welfare bill has to come down. Maybe Labour is not going about it exactly as we would. But it is still the right thing to do. Fiscal responsibility is supposed to be a Conservative thing. So when Labour is taking a Conservative approach to something, maybe the party should back them? A similar problem is presented by the Planning Bill, which had its Second Reading in the Lords this week. Less is at stake in the short run, for the Bill will certainly go through. But the underlying politics are if anything more significant. Labour's Bill is certainly imperfect. It is best characterised as driving the current system to work better: more meaningful plans, less power for local councillors to block, less scope for legal challenge. It has a novel approach to nature protection: essentially making developers pay to restore nature somewhere, but not necessarily on the exact spot where development is taking place. My suspicion is that this is not going to deliver the boost Labour wants. The current system hasn't delivered the target of 300,000 homes a year since the late 1970s. Indeed, since the financial crash, it's only once delivered more than 200,000. Our restrictive controls-based system, with its presumption against building, very likely just can't do it, however streamlined it is. Moreover, although Labour hates it when you mention it, any house building is to a very large extent building for migration. Net immigration is going to be, best case, towards two million under this Government, so at least 125,000 homes every year will be needed simply to accommodate future arrivals. While that's the case, it's going to be very difficult to get political consent to build more – and rightly so. So what is the right political response to this situation? Do Conservatives resist Labour's Bill, arguing that it undermines local democracy and risks the countryside, or support, recognising their approach is imperfect? At the moment the party is doing neither. Instead it is trying to side-step the choice by saying it wants 'more homes, but the right homes, in the right places'. That allows it to sound sympathetic to the policy aims while raising all sorts of difficulties in practice, and (not by chance) to accommodate very different perspectives within the party. But there are risks here: not just that Conservatives get on the wrong side of the argument, but that voters can't see the guiding principle that's being applied, perhaps can't even tell whether we are actually supportive or hostile at all. Once again: when trying to establish a clear profile, maybe this is less than ideal. I know where I stand. Like it or not, and unless you are prepared to engage in what is euphemistically called compulsory 'remigration', which I am not, the population is what it is, and we need to build more houses. That requires both reducing immigration right down to zero for a prolonged period and a serious reform to the current planning system, more like the radical Robert Jenrick proposals from 2021, sadly junked as the Conservative Party entered the early stages of its nervous breakdown. Indeed we might need to be even more radical than that in places like London within the M25. That's obviously not going to happen under Labour, but it is what a post-2029 government on the Right should aim to do. So we shouldn't do things which are inconsistent with it now. Labour's Bill is an imperfect half measure, but it still goes in the right direction. There is no future for the Right in echoing the voice of nimby councillors and the green and Lib Dem blob, determined as they are to stop development or hamstring it with green regulation. The appeal of the Right must instead be to aspiration, to those who want to own a home (and dare I say it more than one?) and get on in life. The Conservative Party at least can't get back in the game without this. Now would be a good time to start.

Leader Live
an hour ago
- Leader Live
Matt Hancock back at Covid inquiry for probe into pandemic impact on care homes
Mr Hancock, who resigned from government in 2021 after admitting breaking social distancing guidance by having an affair with a colleague, has given evidence to the inquiry multiple times. He will return on Wednesday for a full-day session to face questions specifically about the adult social care sector. In a previous appearance before the inquiry he admitted the so-called protective ring he said had been put around care homes early in the pandemic was not an unbroken one and insisted he understands the strength of feeling people have on the issue. At a Downing Street press conference on May 15 2020, Mr Hancock said: 'Right from the start, we've tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes.' Bereaved families have previously branded this phrase a 'sickening lie' and a 'joke'. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, hospital patients were rapidly discharged into care homes in a bid to free up beds and prevent the NHS from becoming overwhelmed. However, there was no policy in place requiring patients to be tested before admission, or for asymptomatic patients to isolate, until mid-April. This was despite growing awareness of the risks of people without Covid-19 symptoms being able to spread the virus. A lawyer for the families from the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice (CBFFJ) campaign group described Mr Hancock's appearance as a 'seminal moment of the Covid inquiry that many of our clients have been waiting for'. Nicola Brook, from Broudie Jackson Canter which represents more than 7,000 families from CBFFJ, said: 'While Mr Hancock has given evidence to the inquiry before, this is the first time that he has been called early in a module, meaning he won't be able to simply respond to others' evidence. 'I only hope that he tells the truth about what he knew about the decision to discharge Covid-infected patients into care homes, which was the biggest scandal of the whole pandemic. Only then will our clients be able to get some form of closure.' From Monday, module six of the inquiry will look at the effect the pandemic had on both the publicly and privately funded adult social care sector across the UK. Among the issues to be examined will be decisions made by the UK Government and devolved administrations on moving people from hospitals into adult care and residential homes in the early stages of the pandemic. The module will also consider how the pandemic was managed in care and residential homes, including infection prevention and control measures, testing for the virus, the availability and adequacy of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the restrictions on access to such locations by healthcare professionals and loved ones. Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said many older people in care homes 'had a truly terrible time during the pandemic'. She added: 'Those older people who survived and are still with us, and their families, have waited a long time for the pandemic inquiry to focus on their experiences but now their turn has finally come, so it's a big moment for them and for the inquiry too.' The CBFFJ group has written to inquiry chairwoman, Baroness Heather Hallett, to express their concern at some 'key decision-makers' not expected to be called in this module, including former prime minister Boris Johnson. They said: 'Without those who were responsible for critical policies like discharging untested hospital patients into care homes, the inquiry cannot deliver a full or credible account of what happened.' They insisted the module must be 'a turning point' rather than 'an afterthought'. 'What happened in the care sector during the pandemic is a national scar. To fail to learn the right lessons now would compound the injustice and place future lives at risk,' they added. Members of bereaved groups from across the UK are due to give evidence on Tuesday, while representatives of the National Care Forum and Royal College of Nursing will give evidence on Thursday. Public hearings for the care sector module are expected to run until the end of July.


Edinburgh Reporter
2 hours ago
- Edinburgh Reporter
Inaugural Edinburgh Prize presented to the World Health Organisation
At the official opening of the Usher Building in Edinburgh Bioquarter on Thursday the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus accepted the first Edinburgh Prize for Global Health Impact on behalf of the organisation. The prize recognises the organisation's programme during the last half century to provide life-saving vaccines for children all over the world. The Director General was emphatic in his view of the programme's impact. He said: 'Since 1974, 154 million lives were saved. So vaccine works, vaccine helps children survive. And that is actually what this prize from the University of Edinburgh is saying and the WHO has contributed significantly to this.' Dr Tedros officially opened the £50 million plus building constructed with funding from The Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal – the £1.5 billion deal funded by both the UK and the Scottish Governments and which involves six local authorities in the area. Funding also came from The Wolfson Foundation. Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus of @ officially opens the £50 million + Usher Building in Edinburgh today — The Edinburgh Reporter (@ 2025-06-26T11:59:30.076Z This building is part of the Data-Driven Innovation part of the City Region Deal and is one of six hubs supported by the initiative. The building is a co-location hub where more than 900 researchers and scientists will work alongside health and social care providers and industry leaders to use data to provide healthcare solutions. Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh said that with his background as a medical doctor he does have some understanding of the work to be carried out in the Usher Building. He said: 'I'm no longer an active researcher, but the ethos of the building is very multidisciplinary. It's the product of a collaboration between the two governments in Westminster and Holyrood in terms of funding, and also the Wolfson Foundation, which is also a very important contributor. But the work itself is very collaborative and across disciplines, across areas and subjects, and also across nations. Sir Peter explained that what the research will provide is facts and data. He cited the example of NHS waiting lists which were 'already under strain prior to the pandemic'. He said: 'it's not as if the pandemic caused all the problems, but what the pandemic did is it brought the problems of the pandemic, but it also put everything else into second place, if you like. So there was then a backlog built up, and we now have this extraordinary number of people on NHS waiting lists in Scotland and in the rest of the UK, with the NHS struggling to keep up. So researchers here will are providing facts and that is really useful for governments to understand where the priorities are. Good policy is formed from good data and good data is formed from multidisciplinary collaborations.' The Rt Hon Ian Murray explained that he is an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh and that it was especially good to be at the opening of the new building. He explained that the UK Government involvement in the City Region Deal had contributed significantly towards the building with a contribution of £48.5 million. He said: 'The real reason for that kind of contribution was to provide buildings like this that can innovate, provide us with the research and development of the future, to bring financiers, partners, institutions, organisations, businesses and researchers all together to collaborate under one roof, to give us that healthcare of the future.' WHO funding Asked about the ongoing challenged of funding the WHO, (In May the WHO reduced its management team and scaled back its operations after the United States announced it was leaving the agency and cutting its financial support leading to a 21% cut in the organisation's budget), Dr Tedros said that they had 'seen it coming' in 2017 when they started the transformation of the WHO. He said: 'The major risk we identified was reliance on a few traditional donors – because if any one of them reduces their funding, the same situation could happen, and the organisation cannot absorb it. 'Not only that, when you rely on only a few traditional donors that also can affect your independence. So at that time, we said we have to broaden our donor base, and that can help us get flexible funding, long term funding. At the same time, it will make WHO more independent, because we rely on almost all 194 countries. 'Our funding started to be broadened out, and it's helping us to minimise the pain due to the current crisis. The contribution that was provided during the last two to three years is helping us to save jobs. We are seeing this as an opportunity. It's a crisis but as an opportunity we will emerge better.' In this imposing building looking down on the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh there is pioneering work taking place with researchers leveraging artificial intelligence to improve surgical outcomes and scientists exploring diagnostic potential through routine retina imaging. WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus L-R The Rt Hon Ian Murray MP Secretary of State for Scotland, Maree Todd MSP. Minister for Drug and Alcohol Policy and Sport and WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who officially opened the Usher Building Some of the 900 academics and researchers who work in the building at the official launch The Rt Hon Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh speaking to members of the Usher family on the left of the photo Like this: Like Related