Top-rated mental health trust asked to save £24m
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- East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT) must deliver £24.1m in savings this year (about 2% of its budget) despite holding the Care Quality Commission's highest "outstanding" rating, and plans to redesign nine front-line services including CAMHS, addiction services, adult mental health crisis and community services, and talking therapies for 2026-27.
- Up to 330 posts from ELFT's 6,000-strong workforce could be affected, with around 40 posts expected to go through reduced spending on temporary staff and a smaller number lost from non-clinical and corporate services.
- Unite announced plans to ballot members on strike action, with regional officer Gary Boodhna warning that taking 5% of the workforce out of the trust will inevitably affect patient services and that staff are "stretched to breaking point."
- Labour MP Apsana Begum wrote to the trust to express fears that the cuts are "particularly targeted towards mental health care services" and undermine efforts to achieve parity between physical and mental health funding.
- ELFT made £37m in efficiency savings last year and said its approach is "clinally led," while managers from the trust have previously been deployed to run other struggling organisations including Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust.
Why it matters: The trust serves 1.8 million people across east London and Bedfordshire, so efficiency-driven cuts at one of the NHS's few "outstanding"-rated mental health providers — previously used to rescue other struggling trusts — risk setting a benchmark that even top-performing services cannot escape. Unite's strike ballot and Begum's intervention put the government on notice that its promise to "transform the quality and sustainability of NHS services" collides with frontline warnings that patients will "feel the consequences."
