Health secretary tells NHS in England to sell land and use fewer agency staff and management consultants

England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has called for the NHS to find a further £10bn (€13bn; $16bn) in savings by 2020 and radically rethink the way it spends money. He said this could be achieved under a new “compact” with health bodies, translated into local agreements between organisations and their staff.

Hunt said that the money saved would contribute to the £22bn efficiency savings earmarked in the NHS Five Year Forward View launched recently by the NHS’s chief executive, Simon Stevens.1 2

Hunt announced the savings plan in a speech to the annual conference of the health think tank the King’s Fund in London on 13 November. He proposed cutting the NHS’s spiralling bill for temporary agency staff and spending less on administration, management consultants, healthcare of migrants, and unused drugs. He said that more had to be done to limit prescribing errors and avert preventable …