Good morning. It’s not often that a big policy story breaks without a drip feed of briefing in advance – but yesterday, Keir Starmer and his health secretary, Wes Streeting, concocted that rare thing: a genuine political surprise. “NHS England will be abolished,” the news alerts said – and once readers got past their initial anxiety that the entire health service had been wiped out for 57 million people, they will have found details of a change that is radical nonetheless.
In the vast bureaucracy of the NHS, NHS England was the supreme quango: an organisation of 15,000 people, responsible for a budget worth well over £150bn, with a list of responsibilities that only ever seemed to grow. Now it is being wound down, at the cost of 10,000 jobs, with the aim of bringing back under government control the execution of policies that will have a huge bearing on Starmer’s fate.
