Redundancies warning for merged NHS spending body

The new Thames Valley Integrated Care Board is set to be created in April 2026

The creation of a new Thames Valley Integrated Care Board (ICB) will lead to "a large number of redundancies", a healthcare boss has warned.

ICB's decide how money is spent on health services in their local area and under government plans, boards across England will be required to spend no more than £19 per person and reduce their running costs by 50%.

Nick Broughton, the current chief executive of Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire & Berkshire (BOB) and Frimley ICBs, told a joint health overview and scrutiny committee that major changes were ahead.

He said there was still a lot of work to do to establish the new ICB and that maintaining staff morale during the transition would be a challenge.

The changes will see a "significant" decrease in running costs, meaning the boards were "looking at a large number of redundancies", Mr Broughton said.

He told the meeting: "Maintaining the morale of the organisation at the same time as delivering for today and planning for tomorrow is a significant challenge."

"There is a lot to do. It is a major piece of work. I am very conscious of the fact that this piece of work will result in a number of our colleagues' roles being made redundant."

He described the current scale of change in NHS as the greatest it has been since its inception.

'Huge potential'

The new Thames Valley Integrated Care Board, which will be formally launched in April 2026 and will serve people across Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire.

The new ICB will cover about 2.5m people and control a £5.6bn budget.

Mr Broughton said the new ICB would be a "smaller team" than is currently in place, which was "in keeping with the fact that we have to reduce our running costs significantly".

He said that he did not underestimate the challenge ahead to create the new ICB, but that the creation of the new board "makes sense."

"I do think there is a huge amount of potential for the new Thames Valley ICB."

"The very fact that we will be covering geography that makes sense, that people recognise, that is coterminous [has the same boundaries] with a number of other geographies, will enable us to have a good deal more traction than perhaps we have had historically," he said.