NHS England – the body responsible for delivering public sector health care in England – is to be abolished to free up money for the delivery of frontline services.

It currently spends £200 billion a year.

The world’s biggest quango, NHS England is an executive body created in 2012 to handle the day-to-day running of the NHS, largely independent from central government. Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, says it has created “burdonsome layers of bureaucracy without any clear lines of accountability.”

Employing 13,500 people, Starmer says NHS England duplicates some of the work done by the Department of Health and Social Care, creating two sets of comms teams, two sets of strategy teams, two sets of policy teams where people are doing the same thing, which costs hundreds of millions of pounds.

“I can’t look people in the eye who say I want a quicker appointment and say I could do something to help you, but I’m not going to do it because I’m somehow fearful of making a difficult decision,” he said when addressing the House of Commons this morning.

Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, says: “Every pound that is wasted on inefficient bureaucracy in good times or bad is a pound that can’t be spent on treating patients faster.”

Streeting says a number of ministers from the previous government had told him in private that they regretted the 2012 reorganisation and wished they had reversed it, but it was put in the “too difficult” box.

“These reforms will deliver a much leaner top of the NHS making significant savings of hundreds of millions of pounds a year,” he says. “This money will flow to the front line to cut waiting times faster and deliver our Plan for Change by slashing through layers of red tape and ending the infantilisation of frontline NHS leaders.”

Tackling the issue of the NHS while improving the nation’s health is a priority for the current government. With its 10 Year Health Plan, it plans to create an NHS fit for the future and with a greater focus on prevention.

A consultation process is currently ongoing ahead of drawing up the strategy and contributions are welcome: https://change.nhs.uk/en-GB/.

Some improvements have already been made. NHS waiting lists have fallen five months in a row. Since the government took office, waiting lists have been cut by almost 160,000, compared to a rise of almost 33,000 during the same period the previous year.

Between July and November last year, the NHS carried out almost 2.2 million more elective care appointments compared to the same period the previous year.

There have been 100,000 more treatments, tests, and scans for patients each week, and more than half a million extra diagnostic tests delivered.

Some of this has come from the NHS buying additional capacity from private hospitals, in a bid to reduce waiting lists and this has had a knock-on effect to access to private medical care.

Liz Terry, editor of HCM, said: "The UK's health service is disjointed, disorganised and inefficient, with multiple teams and departments constantly duplicating tasks and with incompatible systems requiring many of these tasks to be done differently by different teams due to lack of alignment.

"All the various parts of the system – GPs, the ambulance service, consultants, hospitals and outpatient teams, to name but a few, are not coordinated, reducing the quality of care, leading to delays in treatment and wasting resources through inefficiencies, meaning care and staff pay and welfare conditions are not optimised.

"This is in addition to the replication the government is highlighting between NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care.

"A major reboot of the system is to be welcomed and gives the chance to push aside the vested interests and stresses that have got us to this point and to build a new and better system, based on smart tech, active and primary use of cutting edge diagnostics, prevention and a holistic, integrative approach, so the UK gets the best value, best outcome service in the world."

"The key to success is prevention – and early intervention where needed – and the fitness, health and wellness industries are now truly coming into their own as valid partners to the health service.

"We hope ministers will recognise this and ensure that the new system has a fundamental focus on health rather than primarily being a national sickness service."