Three areas of England will change to an integrated care board on 1 April 2027 under a written ministerial statement laid in Parliament on 14 October (HCWS379). The transfers affect Newton Longville in Buckinghamshire and two parts of North Yorkshire. Ministers say the aim is to make the boundaries of NHS commissioners match those of the local authorities that serve the same residents.
Newton Longville will move from Central East Integrated Care Board to Thames Valley Integrated Care Board. The transfer places the whole of the Buckinghamshire Council area within a single board. Central East covers Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Luton, Milton Keynes, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, and it took effect on 1 April 2026 alongside Thames Valley as part of a programme to cut ICB running costs and align public service boundaries. When those footprints were announced in 2025, the government said they might be reviewed to fit future strategic authorities and newly established unitary councils. The Newton Longville transfer is the first such adjustment to be confirmed.
In North Yorkshire, Craven will leave West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board and join Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board. Ingleton and Bentham will move from Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board into the same body. The split dates from the creation of the boards in July 2022. Minutes of the North Yorkshire Health and Wellbeing Board that May recorded that the county council and Craven looked to the West Yorkshire board, with separate links to Lancashire and South Cumbria for people in Bentham and Ingleton. North Yorkshire Council was formed in 2023 from the county and its district councils, so a single unitary authority has since dealt with two neighbouring boards over part of its territory. After April 2027 it will deal with one.
The statement presents the three transfers as steps towards aligning every board with a strategic authority before the end of this Parliament. It indicates that further boundary changes or mergers will be decided for 1 April 2028. The timetable follows the pattern set last year, when the government promised decisions in the summer of 2026 on further mergers and boundary changes for April 2027. The 2025 statement argued that aligned boundaries make it easier to integrate services and to plan jointly between the NHS and strategic authorities.
NHS England guidance for the earlier rounds of change shows what the transition involves. NHS England may make transfer schemes when an ICB's constitution is varied, and the Organisation Data Service must notify the Office for National Statistics so that boundaries can be re-mapped on the NHS Postcode Directory. Most of this work happens out of sight of patients. A 2021 briefing on the earlier move of Glossop into the Derbyshire system stressed that boundary changes were not expected to alter local services. The new statement commits NHS England and local government partners to maintaining continuity of patient care while the transfers take place.
The communities affected are small. Newton Longville is a village on the edge of Milton Keynes, and the North Yorkshire areas are market towns and rural parishes on the border with Lancashire and Cumbria. Their combined population is a fraction of that of the boards that will receive them. Each transfer removes a place where an NHS boundary cuts across a council area, which fits the government’s stated aim of aligning every board with a strategic authority before the end of this Parliament.
Local authorities in the affected areas will now work with the receiving boards on arrangements for the new financial year. The new arrangements will apply from the start of the next financial year, on 1 April 2027.
