Today, NHS England has released its highly anticipated 2025/26 Planning Guidance, outlining how the health service plans to tackle mounting pressures while improving productivity and patient care. Parallel to the planning guidance, NHSE has also released additional embedded guidance documents to address the new objectives set forth in their plan.
The number of national priorities has reduced from last year’s guidance, instead focusing on a small set of headline ambitions and key enablers:
- Reducing elective care wait times
- Improving A&E and ambulance response times
- Enhancing access to general practice and urgent dental care
- Improving mental health and learning disability services
- Living within the budget allocated, reducing waste and improving productivity
- Maintaining collective focus on the overall quality and safety of services
- Addressing inequalities and shift towards prevention.
A full breakdown of the guidance is summarised in the snapshot below:
To enlarge click here
Source: NHSE 2025/26 priorities and operational planning guidance
The planning guidance also marks 2025/26 as a financial reset, requiring systems to develop affordable plans within allocated budgets, improve productivity, and reduce waste, as outlined in the latest Revenue, Finance, and Contracting Guidance. It provides greater financial flexibility in how funding is deployed, with additional government funding contingent on a 1% cost reduction and 4% productivity improvement. Workforce and spending reviews will be critical, with a greater focus on strategic commissioning for ICBs and providers to reassess resources while NHS England reduces its size.
Additionally, the planning process will be streamlined, as outlined in the New Operating model, minimising administrative burden and enabling systems to focus on delivering high-quality, impactful plans.
New Neighbourhood Health Guidelines also set out an urgent need to move to a neighbourhood health service that delivers more care at or closer to home.
See the full 2025/26 priorities and operational planning guidance here.
