Sweeping NHS staff cuts in West Yorkshire pushed back amid lack of funding
West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board has been told to cut its workforce in half - but it can't yet pay for redundancy packages
Last updated 29th Sep 2025
The West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (WYICB) has been told it needs to cut its work force by 50 per cent this year but hasn’t got the cash to make redundancies.
The WYICB was established in July 2022 and is responsible for planning and commissioning local health and care services, taking the functions of the previous NHS West Yorkshire Clinical Commissioning Group. In March of this year, ICBs were notified that the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England, was going to be reducing its workforce by 50 per cent as part of a massive shake up of the health and care system.
At a meeting of the council’s Health and Wellbeing Board last month, Vicky Dutchburn, Interim Place Lead at the Kirklees Health and Care Partnership, said that a deadline of Quarter 3 in the current financial year was given for making cuts to staffing, with this to cover both the headcount and running costs.
The ICB’s original plan was to go out to consultation in July but this was pushed back to September due to matters said to be outside of its control. At yesterday’s (September 25) meeting, it was made clear that the Q3 deadline will not be met due to an absence of funding.
There were already question marks over how the redundancies would be funded and now, the ICB believes it will have to use its own resources, with it said to be “very unlikely” to receive any additional cash to do so. But with this not built into the budget for 25/26, Ms Dutchburn explained that the ICB will not be consulting on the cuts until the start of the next financial year in April at the earliest.
She told the meeting: “Where we’re at regarding the redundancies now is that there still remains a lack of funding for any redundancies this year and that is national. We know from Sir Jim Mackey the Chief Executive of NHS England that it was never planned for at a national level to fund any redundancies.
“So, we now know that it is very unlikely that any funding will be coming down from central to ICBs and that we would be expected to fund it within our own resources, and that is if we go now or at any point in the future as things currently stand. We also know that we cannot manage this this year and that’s not just us as Kirklees, that is the position for West Yorkshire.”
Ms Dutchburn explained that there are ongoing discussions with the treasury at a national level which are expected to conclude in the next couple of weeks, though she felt there is just a “very small” possibility that the position on funding will change.
There are currently around 1,600 people working for the ICB across the whole of West Yorkshire. When cuts are made, it is expected that the number of ICB staff will drop to around 600. With some services set to transition out of the ICB to other providers as part of the rejig, the organisation could end up consisting of between 300 and 340 staff members, an earlier meeting heard.