ICB Watch · NW NHS workforce evidence

Mersey & West Lancashire (Acute · Cheshire & Merseyside)

2026/27 — the year ahead

£49.7mthe savings this board must find in 2026/27.Recurrent CIP for 2026/27 (all recurrent); balanced plan submitted Mar-26 incl £16.7m deficit support funding; £42.2m capital. At M2, £8.9m deficit excl DSF, in line with plan
No 2026/27 workforce target published — none appears in the public papers we hold. 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.
Last year
Cut posts in 2025/26 — its figure counts all staff — substantive plus bank and agency. On permanent (substantive) staff the trust ran above plan. No explicit substantive WTE cut found. How they went about it: a voluntary exit (MARS) scheme ran and recruitment controls operated. National payroll figures show that over roughly the same period (April 2025 to April 2026) the trust’s workforce grew by 53 whole-time-equivalent (WTE) posts (+0.5%). Against the workforce plan it submitted to NHS England for 2025/26, the trust ended March 2026 0.4% above the level its own plan set for that month, counting total staff in post (substantive plus bank and agency) (read from the Cheshire & Merseyside system report’s monitoring chart).
Who was cut

The national payroll change above, broken down by staff group (April 2025 to April 2026):

Support to clinical staff
−69
NHS infrastructure support
−52
Central functions
−48
Managers
−9.1
Senior managers
−1.4
Hotel, property & estates
+6.2
Professionally qualified clinical staff
+175
Risks it carries
We do not hold this trust’s board risk register. This is a gap in our evidence, not a statement that the board records no serious risks. Ask your trust to publish its Board Assurance Framework with its board papers.
What staff say
32.6%say there are enough staff to do their jobtheir benchmark group: 31.3%
31.2%often or always feel burnt outtheir benchmark group: 32.4%
30.8%often think about leavingtheir benchmark group: 29.9%
NHS Staff Survey 2025 · compared with similar trusts iNHS Staff Survey 2025. The comparison figure is the average of the trust’s own “benchmark group” — the set of similar trusts NHS England compares it with.
Why the cuts?
No explicit reason stated — none found in the public record. The trust’s 2026/27 savings requirement of £49.7m 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
  • MWL 25/26 planned workforce reduction of 383.39 WTE (PwC Grip & Control, Q2) Trust Board (Public), November 2025 · p.80
  • MWL 25/26 total workforce 120.2 WTE below plan Trust Board (Public), November 2025 · p.80
  • MWL 2025/26 Annual Workforce Plan (the trust's own March-2025 board table): total workforce planned to FALL from 10,675.17 WTE (31 Mar 25) to 10,292.17 WTE (31 Mar 26) — a 383.00 WTE / 3.7% planned reduction, driven by bank (801.59→587.65) and agency (237.51→145.45); substantive 9,636.07→9,559.07. MWL Trust Board, March 2025 — Annual Plan 2025/26 paper, section 6 Workforce Plan · p.132
  • Mersey & West Lancashire runs a weekly vacancy control panel. MWL (Mersey & West Lancashire) Board — September 2025 · p.57
  • MWL — national MARS leavers contributed to turnover (26/27) Trust Board (Public), May 2026 · p.12
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”).
CIP“cost improvement programme” — the NHS term for a savings plan.
Deficitspending more than the money coming in. A trust whose plan is a deficit is planning to end the year in the red by that amount.
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.
Substantivepermanently employed staff, as opposed to bank or agency staff.
Benchmark groupthe set of similar trusts NHS England compares each trust with in the staff survey.