NHS Mental Health Trust Has Been Accused of an “Unfathomable and Unacceptable” Move After Unveiling Plans to Cut Hundreds of Jobs and a Wide

The East London foundation trust (ELFT), which provides care in east London and Bedfordshire, faces criticism over the scale of the cuts amid rapidly rising demand for mental health support. The plan involves “redesigning” at least 10 key services, including child and adolescent mental health care, talking therapies, addiction support, crisis care for adults, and community programmes for ethnic minorities and poor people. The Fothergill ward, a 20-bed intermediate care unit at the trust’s East Ham care centre, has stopped taking new referrals and is set to close on 21 September.

ELFT plans to shed 330 of its 6,000-strong workforce, about 5%, through redundancies and removing posts. It said it was seeking £24.97m in cuts because NHS England requires all 205 trusts to balance their books. Richard Munn, national officer for health at the union Unite, said cutting mental health services would lead to “exponentially greater costs to the public purse and lead to lives being destroyed”.

He warned that people with acute mental health problems would face longer waiting times, with consequences that could be “tragic, life-changing and irreversible”. Unite is preparing to ballot members over potential strike action, and said its lead official at the trust, Mark Dunne, had lost his job in what Munn called “a sham redundancy”. Labour MP Apsana Begum has written to ELFT’s chief executive, Lorraine Sunduza, asking whether a risk assessment had been carried out, given the likely impact on “public health, public safety and health equalities”.

She noted few plans had been announced for consultation. The trust’s finance committee report to its board on 23 July did not mention the cuts, despite weeks of planning. Dr Tony O’Sullivan, co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, said patients may be forced to go private, and highlighted the “screaming contradiction” of £2.5bn being handed to private firms while ELFT must cut £25m. ELFT said no cuts would move to implementation without passing through quality impact assessment, and that its approach was “clinically led”