50,000 NHS jobs to go, apparently

An anti-cuts campaign website, False Economy, claims that 50,000 NHS jobs will be lost over the next four years. It’s a bald, headline grabbing figure and the response has been predictably feverish.
 
But tug a little, and the numbers unravel. One of the key points is made by False Economy themselves: that “most of the cuts are likely to be achieved through natural wastage” – in other words, by people moving on, or retiring, of their own accord. In figures highlighted by the Department of Health, for instance, one foundation trust expects to shed 14 per cent of its workforce through natural wastage by 2013. The health service may choose not to fill the vacancies that result, but this is hardly a wave of mass sackings.

There are also substantial inconsistencies in the False Economy report: counting a doctor who has moved from one hospital to another as a job cut; counting unfilled vacancies as a job cut; and so on.