The impact of closing Healthwatch on health resilience

Image credit: Healthwatch

Last week, the UK Government published a 10-Year Health Plan for England, outlining sweeping reforms of NHS governance, including the closure, merger, or absorption of over 200 Arm’s-Length Bodies (ALBs). Our Insight Lead, Tom Watkins, has been looking at the impacts of closing Healthwatch - set up to enable people to have a voice about their health and social care systems - and how this might affect health resilience.

The closure of Healthwatch by mid 2026 and the proposed dismantling of a further 200+ NHS ALBs represent a profound shift in the infrastructure that supports health resilience in the UK. These changes risk silencing key mechanisms designed to elevate the voices of those most affected by ill health, particularly individuals and communities experiencing acute or chronic vulnerability through that ill health. 

Healthwatch, in particular - although far from perfect - provided a rare model of authentic community representation. It combined professional expertise with a powerful, motivated volunteer base, mobilising lived experience to inform and influence health and care services. Its removal signals a retreat from valuing grassroots insight and co-produced accountability. 

The current indication is, like that of NHS England, Healthwatch’s statutory functions will transfer to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). We have concern that replacing this independent body with a centralised government function not only distances (particularly local) decision-making from patient realities, but also undermines the impartiality needed to advocate effectively for those most at risk. This is especially troubling given the very failures in patient voice and safety that led to Healthwatch’s creation under the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Lessons, it seems, are not truly learned (see: Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Scandal) 

This is not just administrative reform—it equates to dismantling the civic infrastructure that connects people to power. Like shutting libraries and community halls, it severs the trusted, local channels through which vulnerable voices are heard and supported. For the wider voluntary and community sector (VCS), this weakens the ecosystem of resilience, placing additional burden on some who play a health advocacy role and removing a key partner in identifying need, surfacing risk, and building trust. 

Read the ‘10 Year Health Plan for England: fit for the future’, here