A campaign has launched a formal petition calling on Health Secretary James Murray to reject proposals to significantly curtail NHS recruitment and use artificial intelligence to fill the gap.

Keep Our NHS Public Demands Evidence-Based Staffing Plan As AI Recruitment Cuts Loom

The pressure on the new Health Secretary is building from an unexpected direction. Keep Our NHS Public (KONP), the civil society campaign group that has consistently opposed the privatisation of NHS services, has published a petition demanding that James Murray rejects what it describes as “dangerous proposals” to scale back NHS recruitment and replace clinical roles with artificial intelligence. 

The call lands at a moment when the question of how much weight ministers are prepared to give AI in the future NHS workforce has become one of the most contested in UK health policy.

The Leak That Started The Debate

The petition cites reporting by the Financial Times, which obtained a draft NHS workforce document prepared under the previous Health Secretary, Wes Streeting. That document proposed cutting the annual rate of NHS staffing growth to between 1.1 and 2 per cent, a significant reduction from the trajectory set out in the 2023 NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, which envisaged growth of 2.6 to 2.9 per cent per year and a total NHS workforce of 2.3 million by the mid-2030s.

The draft document warned that maintaining the existing recruitment trajectory would represent, in its own words, a path to financial ruin. The proposed changes would, according to analysis of the figures, result in up to 380,000 fewer people working in the NHS in the mid-2030s than previously forecast. The implication is stark: AI-enabled productivity would be expected to absorb a substantial share of the demand that an expanded human workforce would otherwise have met.

What KONP Is Actually Arguing

KONP’s petition is not simply opposed to AI in healthcare. The group acknowledges that technology can play a useful supporting role. What it contests is the use of AI as a fiscal mechanism, a means of justifying a reduction in trained staff headcount rather than a genuine enhancement of clinical capacity. This is a distinction worth taking seriously.

The petition points to the 3 million people currently on long-term sick leave as evidence that the country needs a healthier workforce, not a smaller one, and argues that NHS staffing should be understood as a public investment rather than a liability. It calls for a “serious evidence-based workforce plan that looks in detail at future health care needs.” That framing an appeal for evidence rather than ideology echoes the language used by professional bodies across the sector in recent weeks.

The Royal College of Nursing, alongside other unions and professional bodies, called for the new workforce plan to be paused over concerns that it fails to safely grow staff numbers and over-relies on AI. Alan Lofthouse of Unison has warned publicly that replacing skilled clinical staff with unproven technology would be reckless. These are not fringe voices. 

A Debate IC News Has Been Following Closely

The timing of the KONP petition matters because it arrives in the middle of a broader policy moment that IC News has tracked throughout June. Last week, this publication reported on the MHRA’s most extensive public engagement exercise on artificial intelligence in healthcare, which found that patients broadly support AI in health settings but demand transparency, oversight, and the assurance of human control. The public appetite for AI in healthcare, in other words, is conditional not unconditional.

We also reported on NHS England’s decision to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot to more than 500,000 staff, the largest healthcare AI rollout in the world, by NHS England’s own description and the unresolved legal questions it raises around clinical liability. Both stories point to the same underlying tension: AI is arriving at scale in the NHS while the governance, evidence base, and workforce implications remain unsettled.

What The Evidence Actually Shows

The case for AI-led productivity in NHS settings is not without substance. The Copilot trial involving more than 30,000 NHS workers across 90 organisations reported average time savings of 43 minutes per working day, a figure that, if replicated at scale, would represent a significant administrative dividend. But administrative time savings are not the same as clinical capacity. An AI tool that helps a clinician draft correspondence faster does not replace a nurse at the bedside, a physiotherapist conducting a home visit, or a care coordinator managing a complex discharge.

The Royal College of Nursing’s analysis of NHS data found that the year to March 2026 recorded the lowest annual growth in overall NHS staff numbers in thirteen years while the number of people in England aged 75 and over is projected to rise by 19 per cent between 2026 and 2036. That trajectory of fewer staff, more complex needs is precisely the combination that KONP argues makes this the wrong moment to reduce recruitment ambition.

What Comes Next

The petition is addressed to James Murray as the incoming Health Secretary, though it is worth noting that the leaked workforce document was produced under his predecessor. Whether Murray will adopt, modify, or set aside the draft plan remains to be seen. What is certain is that the workforce question will not wait. The 2023 NHS Long Term Workforce Plan set out a clear staffing trajectory. Any material departure from that trajectory however it is framed will require a credible evidence base to withstand scrutiny from the unions, the royal colleges, and an increasingly informed public.

Technology will be part of the answer. That much seems settled. The question that remains wide open is how much of the answer it is expected to be, and whether the evidence yet exists to justify the weight being placed on it.

Click here to sign the petition.