Wes Streeting said the NHS is “addicted to overspending”, as he confirmed he is seeking cuts within Integrated Care Boards (ICBs).
The health secretary told Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillipsthat ICBs – which areresponsible for planning local health services – have been tasked with finding 50% savings to boost efficiency.
It’s part of the government’s plans to slash bureaucracy in the health service – which Mr Streeting acknowledged on Sunday would cause anxiety among administrators facing job losses.
Image: Sir Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting visit a healthcare provider in Surrey. Pic: Reuters
He said he was “genuinely sorry” for people worried about the future, but efficiency savings would divert money to the frontline of the NHS.
Confirming that Jim Mackey, head of the soon-to-be abolished NHS England, had written to ICBs asking them to halve their running costs, Mr Streeting said: “Financial plans to us would have involved an overspend between £5bn and £6bn before the new financial year is even begun.
“And I’m afraid this speaks to the culture that I identified before the general election, where the NHS is addicted to overspending, is addicted to running operating deficits with the assumption that someone will come along to bail them out, which local councils would never be able to do.”
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Reports of the cuts have sparked concerns among health leaders.
Matthew Taylor, head of the NHS Confederation, said it will require “major changes” and make the task of delivering “long term transformation of the NHS much harder”.
Image: An NHS hospital ward. File pic: PA
Mr Streeting denied the cut was effectively a form of austerity, saying the government is going after a culture of “waste and inefficiency” which “isn’t just frustrating patients and taxpayers” but staff working for the NHS too.
“They can see layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy and accountability,” he said.
“That’s not the fault of the people working in the system. They are also victims of it.
“And that’s why we’re going hard at achieving those savings in order to redeploy money into frontline services, which benefit patients.”
The government also announced this week it would be scrapping NHS England, the world’s biggest quango, saying there is too much duplication with the work that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) does.
Scrapping NHS England ‘beginning not the end’
Mr Streeting has since indicated he will look to scrap other health-related bodies, writing in The Sunday Telegraph that axing NHS England is “the beginning, not the end”.
Asked what other organisations could be for the chopping board, Mr Streeting said he did not want to “get ahead” of a review by Dr Penny Dash into the operational effectiveness of NHS regulators.
“What I will do is look at how we can reduce the number of regulators, reduce the number of regulations wherever possible… and try to reduce the amount of money we are spending,” he said.
The cabinet minister defended the language being used to describe the plans, after he described the NHS as being “bloated” by bureaucracy and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called it “flabby”.
Streeting ‘genuinely sorry’ about job losses
Mr Streeting stressed he was “talking about the system, not the people who work in it” – adding that he was “genuinely sorry” about the job losses that will come down the line.
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1:25
Conservatives: Scrapping NHS England is ‘right thing’
The government has not yet said how many jobs it expects to axe under the reforms.
Mr Streeting acknowledged lots of people will be anxious about their futures, adding: “I’m genuinely sorry about that, because I don’t want them to be in that position. But I’ve got to make the changes.”
The government’s plans have generally received support from opposition parties, though there have been calls for more details.
Shadow education secretary Laura Trott said reorganisation reforms introduced by the Tories in 2013 were “well-intentioned but didn’t work” and she agrees “in principle” with what Labour has put forward.
However she said the changes aren’t a “silver bullet” and could result in further costs and disruption so “we’ll need to see a very clear plan from the government for how that won’t affect waiting lists further”.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats said the government must “take the same sense of urgency shown here to social care, and complete their review by the end of the year rather than continuing to kick the can down the road”.
Opinion by: Casey Ford, PhD, researcher at Nym Technologies
Web3 rolled in on the wave of decentralization. Decentralized applications (DApps) grew by 74% in 2024 and individual wallets by 485%, with total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) closing at a near-record high of $214 billion. The industry is also, however, heading straight for a state of capture if it does not wake up.
As Elon Musk has teased of placing the US Treasury on blockchain, however poorly thought out, the tides are turning as crypto is deregulated. But when they do, is Web3 ready to “protect [user] data,” as Musk surrogates pledge? If not, we’re all on the brink of a global data security crisis.
The crisis boils down to a vulnerability at the heart of the digital world: the metadata surveillance of all existing networks, even the decentralized ones of Web3. AI technologies are now at the foundation of surveillance systems and serve as accelerants. Anonymity networks offer a way out of this state of capture. But this must begin with metadata protections across the board.
Metadata is the new frontier of surveillance
Metadata is the overlooked raw material of AI surveillance. Compared to payload data, metadata is lightweight and thus easy to process en masse. Here, AI systems excel best. Aggregated metadata can reveal much more than encrypted contents: patterns of behaviors, networks of contacts, personal desires and, ultimately, predictability. And legally, it is unprotected in the way end-to-end (E2E) encryptedcommunications are now in some regions.
While metadata is a part of all digital assets, the metadata that leaks from E2E encrypted traffic exposes us and what we do: IPs, timing signatures, packet sizes, encryption formats and even wallet specifications. All of this is fully legible to adversaries surveilling a network. Blockchain transactions are no exception.
From piles of digital junk can emerge a goldmine of detailed records of everything we do. Metadata is our digital unconscious, and it is up for grabs for whatever machines can harvest it for profit.
The limits of blockchain
Protecting the metadata of transactions was an afterthought of blockchain technology. Crypto does not offer anonymity despite the reactionary association of the industry with illicit trade. It offers pseudonymity, the ability to hold tokens in a wallet with a chosen name.
Harry Halpin and Ania Piotrowska have diagnosed the situation:
“[T]he public nature of Bitcoin’s ledger of transactions […] means anyone can observe the flow of coins. [P]seudonymous addresses do not provide any meaningful level of anonymity, since anyone can harvest the counterparty addresses of any given transaction and reconstruct the chain of transactions.”
As all chain transactions are public, anyone running a full node can have a panoptic view of chain activity. Further, metadata like IP addresses attached to pseudonymous wallets can be used to identify people’s locations and identities if tracking technologies are sophisticated enough.
This is the core problem of metadata surveillance in blockchain economics: Surveillance systems can effectively de-anonymize our financial traffic by any capable party.
Knowledge is also an insecurity
Knowledge is not just power, as the adage goes. It’s also the basis on which we are exploited and disempowered. There are at least three general metadata risks across Web3.
Fraud: Financial insecurity and surveillance are intrinsically linked. The most serious hacks, thefts or scams depend on accumulated knowledge about a target: their assets, transaction histories and who they are. DappRadar estimates a $1.3-billion loss due to “hacks and exploits” like phishing attacks in 2024 alone.
Leaks: The wallets that permit access to decentralized tokenomics rely on leaky centralized infrastructures. Studies of DApps and wallets have shown the prevalence of IP leaks: “The existing wallet infrastructure is not in favor of users’ privacy. Websites abuse wallets to fingerprint users online, and DApps and wallets leak the user’s wallet address to third parties.” Pseudonymity is pointless if people’s identities and patterns of transactions can be easily revealed through metadata.
Chain consensus: Chain consensus is a potential point of attack. One example is a recent initiative by Celestia to add an anonymity layer to obscure the metadata of validators against particular attacks seeking to disrupt chain consensus in Celestia’s Data Availability Sampling (DAS) process.
Securing Web3 through anonymity
As Web3 continues to grow, so does the amount of metadata about people’s activities being offered up to newly empowered surveillance systems.
Beyond VPNs
Virtual private network (VPN) technology is decades old at this point. The lack of advancement is shocking, with most VPNs remaining in the same centralized and proprietary infrastructures. Networks like Tor and Dandelion stepped in as decentralized solutions. Yet they are still vulnerable to surveillance by global adversaries capable of “timing analysis” via the control of entry and exit nodes. Even more advanced tools are needed.
Noise networks
All surveillance looks for patterns in a network full of noise. By further obscuring patterns of communication and de-linking metadata like IPs from metadata generated by traffic, the possible attack vectors can be significantly reduced, and metadata patterns can be scrambled into nonsense.
Anonymizing networks have emerged to anonymize sensitive traffic like communications or crypto transactions via noise: cover traffic, timing obfuscations and data mixing. In the same spirit, other VPNs like Mullvad have introduced programs like DAITA (Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis), which seeks to add “distortion” to its VPN network.
Scrambling the codes
Whether it’s defending people against the assassinations in tomorrow’s drone wars or securing their onchain transactions, new anonymity networks are needed to scramble the codes of what makes all of us targetable: the metadata our online lives leave in their wake.
The state of capture is already here. Machine learning is feeding off our data. Instead of leaving people’s data there unprotected, Web3 and anonymity systems can make sure that what ends up in the teeth of AI is effectively garbage.
Opinion by: Casey Ford, PhD, researcher at Nym Technologies.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Since taking office nine months ago Sir Keir Starmer has weathered party rows about winter fuel payments, the two child benefit cap, WASPI women, airport expansion and cuts to international aid.
All of these decisions have been justified in the name of balancing the books – filling that notorious £22bn black hole, sticking to the fiscal rules, and in the pursuit of growth as the government’s number one priority.
But welfare reform feels like a far more existential row.
Ministers have been making the point for weeks that the health benefits bill for working-age people has ballooned by £20bn since the pandemic and is set to grow by another £18bn over the next five years, to £70bn.
But the detail of where those cuts could fall is proving highly divisive.
Not the final version perhaps – but given all backbench Labour MPs who were summoned to meetings with the Number 10 policy teams for briefings this week, that response is perhaps more than a little disingenuous.
In his interview with Sir Trevor Phillips, he went on to make the broader case for PIP reform – highlighting the thousand people who sign up to the benefit every day and arguing that the system needs to be “sustainable”, to “deliver for those that need it most” and “provide the right kind of support for the different types of need that exist”.
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0:54
Streeting defends PM’s comments on ‘flabby’ public sector
To me this signals the government are preparing to unveil a tighter set of PIP eligibility criteria, with a refocus on supporting those with the greatest needs.
Changes to incapacity benefit to better incentivise working – for those who can – are also clearly on the cards.
The health secretary has been hitting out at the “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions, arguing that “going out to work is better for your mental and physical health, than being spent and being stuck at home”, and promising benefit reforms that will help support people back to work rather than “trapped in the benefits system”.
Turning Tory?
Starmer said this week the current welfare system couldn’t be defended on economic or moral grounds.
The Conservatives don’t disagree.
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1:25
Conservatives: Scrapping NHS England is ‘right thing’
Before the election, they proposed £12bn in cuts to the welfare bill, with a focus on getting people on long-term sickness back to work.
This morning, shadow education secretary Laura Trott claimed Labour denied that welfare cuts were needed during the election campaign and had wasted time in failing to include benefits reform in the King’s Speech.
“They’re coming to this chaotically, too late and without a plan,” she said.
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Notwithstanding the obvious critique that the Tories had 14 years to get a grip on the situation – what’s most striking here is that, yet again, the Labour government seems to be borrowing Conservative clothes.
When challenged by Sir Trevor this morning, Streeting denied they were turning Tory – claiming the case for welfare reform and supporting people into work is a Labour argument.
But, from increasing defence spending and cutting the aid budget to scrapping NHS England, there’s a definite pattern emerging.
If you didn’t know a Labour administration was in charge, you might have assumed these were the policies of a Conservative government.
It’s a strategy which makes many of his own backbenchers deeply uncomfortable.
But it’s doing a good job of neutering the Tory opposition.
Toncoin Open Interest (OI) has jumped 67% over the past 24 hours amid reports of Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s departure from France, where he had been required to stay since his arrest seven months ago.
On March 15, Toncoin (TON) OI — a metric tracking the total number of unsettled Toncoin derivative contracts such as options and futures — reached $169 million, representing a 67% increase from the previous day when the reports of Durov’s departure first surfaced, according to CoinGlass data.
Toncoin open interest reaches highest level in 42 days
It is the highest level of OI in Toncoin since Feb. 1, when it was sitting at $171.49 million.
TON is The Open Network’s native cryptocurrency and is the exclusive blockchain infrastructure for Telegram’s Mini App ecosystem.
Toncoin open interest surged 67% on March 15. Source: CoinGlass
TON’s price jumped 17% over the same 24-hour period, trading at $3.45 at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Trading resource account Crypto Billion said in a March 15 X post that Toncoin is “showing signs of a potential long-term accumulation phase as it stabilizes near key support levels.”
However, if this rally is short-lived, around $18.8 million in long positions could be liquidated if TON’s price falls back toward the $3 level it was trading at on March 14.
Toncoin open interest also surged after arrest in 2024
The court reportedly allowed Durov to travel to Dubai, a city with no extradition agreements with many countries.
The market’s reaction hints at the potential significance of this case for the crypto industry. Many are worried that Durov’s arrest in August 2024 in France could set a precedent for cracking down on other privacy-focused services. He was accused of running a platform that enables illicit transactions.