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It's emerging, hundreds of overseas NHSE staff face losing their job with no compensation.
Civil Service recruitment rules means, overseas NHS England staff , not born in the UK, may not be able to work as civil servants, could be made redundant, and…
… questions remain over whether all affected staff will qualify for redundancy compensation or redeployment protections.
The fact nobody seems able to explain clearly what protections apply, tells you everything about how badly prepared this process appears to be.
A few hundred people. An HR anomaly? An unfortunate technicality?
No. It is symbolic of a much bigger problem…
… the shambolic way the DH+ appears to be handling what may become one of the biggest white-collar redundancy programmes in modern British history, with the potential for 18,000 redundancies…
… with no obvious funding apart from ‘operational savings’.
British Airways’ plan to shed 12,000 staff during Covid caused national outrage and parliamentary inquiries. The NHS restructuring now under-way, is potentially bigger.
The people caught in this latest row are not faceless. They’re programme managers, analysts, digital specialists, clinicians, finance experts, policy staff and administrators.
They are not here taking anyone’s job. The DH+ now looks as though it’s intent on taking theirs away, and …
…if they come for your friends and workmates… what excuse will they manufacture to come for you?
They’ve worked, here. Put in the hard yards, here. Taken work home at weekends, here. Made sense of bonkers policy, here.
Now some are discovering that although they were employable enough for the NHS, they may not be employable enough for the civil service structures replacing it.
Nothing has changed. They haven’t.
Their skills haven’t.
Their jobs haven’t…
… only the organisation chart… and perhaps the migration statistics and murky policy.
That tells us something important.
This reorganisation was announced politically long before it was understood operationally.
Senior civil servants, NHS leaders and the organisations who represent them should have said; ‘Woha… slow down… lets plan this.’
Instead they didn’t want to risk their jobs, their status and their need to be ‘in the tent’, so they fawned and complied.
Immigration status, redundancy rights, pension implications, redeployment rules and civil service eligibility… apparently trashed.
If hundreds of people are trapped in confusion and uncertainty, what confidence should anyone have about the handling of the other thousands?
The atmosphere inside parts of the system is already deeply unsettled.
Reports linking at least one suicide to the stress surrounding the process cast a long shadow over everything. The very existence of concerns like this tells us how febrile the situation has become.
Probably because the DH+ is discovering something uncomfortable…
… running the NHS is not the same as dismantling bits of it.
Private-sector organisations undertaking mass redundancies usually build huge support structures around the process;
- specialist HR teams,
- counselling,
- legal support,
- transition planning,
- internal communications and
- carefully managed consultation.
Instead, this feels improvised.
Rushed. Reactive.
The danger is not only unfairness to staff, though there is clearly a risk of that...
... the bigger danger is organisational trauma and the loss of status as an employer.
When staff see colleagues treated badly, uncertainty spreads everywhere. Productivity falls. Sickness absence rises. People stop taking decisions.
The best staff quietly leave because they know they can. Those who remain become cautious, fearful and distrustful.
All this is happening while ministers expect the NHS simultaneously to improve productivity, reduce waiting lists, adopt AI, reform neighbourhood care and avoid further industrial action.
That is not transformation. It is overload.
The NHS has always known how to recruit people at scale. What this episode suggests is that the centre has very little idea how to let people go at scale… legally, competently or humanely.
Before another redundancy notice is issued, this process needs to pause.
The DH+ needs experienced industrial relations leadership, specialist HR capability and clear legal accountability for the transfer process, because…
… at the moment, hundreds of staff appear trapped in a bureaucratic limbo entirely of the system’s own making, and…
…very NHS employee watching this unfold is drawing their own conclusions about loyalty, trust and whether the system would stand by them if their turn came next.
When a system starts treating loyal colleagues as administrative problems...
... everyone else begins to wonder when it will be their turn, to be a problem.
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