Blackpool Teaching Hospitals (Acute · Lancashire & South Cumbria)
2026/27 — the year ahead
£34.9mthe savings this board must find in 2026/27.2026/27 Waste Reduction Programme requirement, c.£34.9m. 25/26: £44.7m target, £27.9m (62%) delivered.
−425 WTEthe workforce reduction in its 2026/27 plan. iWhat does a “workforce reduction” mean? Not always people losing their jobs. Boards count in WTE — units of one full-time post — and the routes differ in who they touch. Cutting agency work: paid work lost, but no NHS post existed. Cutting bank shifts: extra shifts mostly worked by the trust’s own staff — a pay cut that never shows in post counts. Freezing vacancies: no one is dismissed, but the post and its future job go, and the work lands on those who remain. Deleting posts shrinks the establishment itself. Voluntary exits: MARS is a paid resignation without redundancy rights; voluntary redundancy is redundancy on volunteered terms. Compulsory redundancy is the rarest route — boards report it separately in their audited accounts.An approximate figure, the board's own top-down number. Replaces a withdrawn earlier figure of 376 (retracted 24 May, filing error); the 766 gross figure is inflated by a reclassification.
Last year
Cut posts in 2025/26 — a WTE reduction. The trust reported delivering against its plan, but no single verified figure for the 25/26 workforce change appears in the papers we hold. How they went about it: a voluntary exit (MARS) scheme ran and recruitment controls operated.
Who was cut
The national payroll count is not usable for this trust this year. Whole services — and their staff — moved between organisations during the year, so the count would mix those transfers with genuine cuts. Documented: One LSC shared corporate-services transfer (ELHT is host) (documented in our transfer audit)-08-07; LSC pathology single service transferred to LTH as lead provider on the first of April — donors named in the pack as ELHT, Blackpool and Morecambe Bay, moving under TUPE with roles and locations unchanged; documented (documented in our transfer audit)-08-09. The board’s own programme figures above are the usable evidence here.
Risks it carries
We hold
3 strategic risks from this board’s own register; the captured extract carries no numeric scores for this trust. Among them: “Loss of workforce supply pipeline (apprenticeships)”.
Concern that the Trust currently has no new apprenticeships coming through. A major strategic risk to future workforce supply. … Without apprenticeships, the organisation risked a serious workforce gap within the next 3–5 years, precisely at a time when demand continues to rise.
Several high-quality trainees had stated that they would be willing to return to the Trust as consultants, only if job planning and on-call rotas, particularly in acute medicine, were significantly improved. The poor rota design, lack of resilience, and unsustainable on-call demands were direct deterrents to applicants.
What staff say
23.4%say there are enough staff to do their jobtheir benchmark group: 31.3%
37.8%often or always feel burnt outtheir benchmark group: 32.4%
40.0%often think about leavingtheir benchmark group: 29.9%
Why the cuts?
No explicit reason stated — none found in the public record. The trust’s 2026/27 savings requirement of £34.9m appears at the top of this card; its papers stop short of stating the reason in words. iNo explicit reason for the workforce reduction appears anywhere in the public board papers we hold and coded. Reasons may have been discussed in private session — we are not privy to those discussions; we record what the public papers show. Where the trust has published a savings requirement, that context appears on this card, and readers can weigh it for themselves.
On the record — the board’s own papers & where every figure comes from
- BTH made qualitative 'exceptional progress' on workforce in 25/26; the 8,063->7,297 (~766 WTE) figure is a 26/27 PLAN incl. a 612 WTE OneLSC transfer-out, NOT a delivered 25/26 cut. Blackpool Teaching Hospitals BoD Public — 2 April 2026 · p.180
- BTH 2026/27 planned headcount reduction c.425 WTE BTH Board of Directors (Public), 2 April 2026 · p.180
- Blackpool Teaching Hospitals MARS scheme: WRP item T40 opened 01/11/2025 (M8 25/26), Partially Achieved at 11/03/2026 EQIA Panel review BTH Board of Directors Public — 8 January 2026 (Appendix C: 21 PIRs / EQIA Panel tracking; WRP scheme list) · p.268-269
- BTH ran a MARS scheme (Corporate T40 MARS, from 01/11/2025). Blackpool Teaching Hospitals BoD Public — 8 January 2026
- BTH runs a Vacancy and Spend Control Panel (recruitment control). Blackpool Teaching Hospitals BoD Public — 7 May 2026
Sources: the trust’s own board papers (cited above) · NHS England workforce statistics (Apr→Apr, our arithmetic) · NHS Staff Survey 2025 · every figure is traceable to the evidence ledger on the audit twin of this page
Plain-English key
WTE / FTEtwo names for the same measure — one full-time post’s worth of paid staff time (two half-time staff count as one). It is a unit of time, not a count of people: a reduction of 100 WTE can mean fewer people, fewer hours, or fewer bank and agency shifts, and is usually a mix. Boards plan and report in WTE across all staff — permanent, bank and agency together — and so does this card, which says which of those a figure counts. Boards write WTE (“whole-time equivalent”); the national statistics write FTE (“full-time equivalent”).
MARS“mutually agreed resignation scheme” — a voluntary paid-exit scheme.
Establishmentthe number of funded posts a trust plans to employ — its budgeted staffing level — whether or not each post is filled. Removing a vacancy from the establishment cuts the planned staffing level without anyone losing a job.
Benchmark groupthe set of similar trusts NHS England compares each trust with in the staff survey.