Chancellor promises ‘more nurses’ in Budget speech

The government will use savings made through AI and automation and the scrapping of NHS England to invest in ‘more nurses’, the chancellor has announced.

In setting out the Autumn Budget today, Rachel Reeves promised to ‘renew’ the NHS and invest in its future.

She outlined a range of savings the government intended to make to ‘reinvest’ into the ‘care people rely on’ – including the provision of more staff and more appointments.

This included through AI and automation; the abolition of NHS England and cutting 18,000 ‘back office’ staff; getting rid of police and crime commissioners; and through ‘cutting the cost of politics and local government and selling government assets that we no longer have any use for’.

Ms Reeves thanked the Treasury for driving these cost cuttings forward – first promised as £14bn in efficiencies per year in the Spending Review in June.

‘These savings will be required across government, but for our National Health Service, I will reinvest all of these savings back into the care that people rely on – more nurses, more GPs, more appointments… and investing in the future of our National Health Service.’

Ms Reeves went on to outline 250 new neighbourhood health centres that will be staffed by nurses GPs, dentists and pharmacists – as revealed on Tuesday – of which 100 will be delivered by 2030.

The chancellor said this was a move to expand ‘more services into communities so that people can receive treatment outside of hospitals and get better, faster care where they live’.

‘The Labour Party founded our national health service, and we will renew our National Health Service,’ she added.

The promise of more nurses comes amid concerns around nurse redundancies being made as part of a 50% cut to headcounts as integrated care boards (ICBs).

In August, the RCN warned that the threat of nurse redundancies and ongoing uncertainty around cuts to ICBs was placing significant strain on the workforce and ‘undermining the delivery of vital nursing functions’.

Previously, the 2019 Conservative government had pledged to deliver 50,000 more nurses into the workforce. But when the target was met in November 2023, it was revealed only 361 were general practice nurses – less than 1%.

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