The health secretary’s plans to cut 5,500 management jobs to fund community services if the Conservatives win the general election have been criticised as “not credible” by Labour and “paper thin” by MiP.

Health secretary Victoria Atkins unveiled plans to cut thousands more NHS management jobs to fund expansion of pharmacy and community health services if the Conservatives win the general election.

The proposals have been criticised by MiP as “paper-thin”, and by Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, who said funding services by cutting management was “not a credible policy position”.

The Conservatives announced on 3 June plans to cut 5,550 management jobs from NHS organisations “not providing frontline patient care” to fund expansion of the Pharmacy First scheme, which allows patients to get prescriptions directly from pharmacists without a GP appointment, as well as “building or modernising” 250 GP surgeries and building 50 new community diagnostic centres.

Atkins described the cuts, which she claimed would save £1.2 billion by the end of the decade, as “a really interesting and thoughtful way” to fund the party’s plans. “We know that during the pandemic we had a really big increase in managers because the NHS had to cope with that, and now we want to bring it back to pre-pandemic levels,” she told Sky News.

She said the Pharmacy First scheme was “good for patients walking in of the off the street” and “good for pharmacists because we want to use these highly skilled professionals to the top of their licence”. She added: “This is part of my reforms to the NHS to make it faster, simpler and fairer and bring care closer to us as patients.”

Commenting on the proposals for the Health Service Journal on 19 June, Labour’s Wes Streeting said that it would be “the easiest thing in the world” to promise to spend more on services by cutting management jobs. “But I don’t think that would have been a credible policy opposition, which is why we resisted the attraction of the cheap headline in favour of coming up with serious policy solutions that are properly funded and can be accounted for,” he said.

MiP chief executive Jon Restell described the proposals as “paper-thin” and warned the plans ignored “the overwhelming body of evidence that shows good managers have a positive impact on service efficiency, retention of staff and quality of care”.

He added: “Managers don’t exist to get in the way of their clinical colleagues. They’re there to create environments where clinicians can focus on what they do best — spending their time caring for patients. NHS productivity will always be held back if politicians continue to ignore this.”

The plan would come as a blow to staff at NHS England which has already shed around 7,000 jobs in the last two years as part of an often-chaotic organisational change programme following its merger with NHS Improvement. Further job losses would also be likely at England’s 42 ICBs, which are already cutting staff as a result of 30% government cut in admin budgets.