North London NHS Foundation Trust: Successor to Tavistock and Portman

If you were looking for Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust

If a job advert, old reference, or search result led you here expecting to find the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, it's worth being direct: that trust no longer exists as a separate legal entity. It was dissolved on 31 March 2026 and merged into North London NHS Foundation Trust with effect from 1 April 2026. This was the second and final stage of a broader north London mental health consolidation — North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) itself was only created on 1 November 2024, from the merger of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. Pre-merger, the combined Barnet/Enfield/Haringey and Camden/Islington organisation reported a budget of around £670 million and roughly 6,000 staff; with Tavistock and Portman folded in, the enlarged trust's projected figures rise to around £740 million and roughly 6,800 staff.

Anyone applying for a role that would once have been advertised under the Tavistock and Portman name — including its training and education functions — is now applying to work for North London NHS Foundation Trust, which is the legal employer of record. We're covering NLFT here in full, both because it's the genuine current successor organisation and because Tavistock and Portman's distinctive specialisms (its postgraduate training, its adult and CAMHS psychotherapy services, and its forensic and eating disorder provision through the wider merged trust) are now part of what NLFT offers staff.

What happened to the Gender Identity Development Service

It's worth being precise about the sequence of events, since this is one of the more widely reported and sometimes misunderstood parts of the Tavistock's recent history. The Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) — the NHS's single specialist gender identity service for children and young people — closed in March 2024, around two years before the Tavistock and Portman trust itself was dissolved into North London NHS Foundation Trust. The closure followed the independent Cass Review, led by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, whose final report concluded that the single-provider model for this service was unsustainable and called for a fundamentally different, regionalised approach to care. Following the closure, NHS England established a small number of new regional children's and young people's gender services at other NHS providers, including hubs in London and Liverpool that opened from April 2024, rather than transferring GIDS's caseload into what later became North London NHS Foundation Trust.

We're reporting this sequence factually — the service closed under the former Tavistock and Portman trust, well before that trust's later dissolution and merger — without taking a position on the underlying policy debate about gender identity services for young people, which is genuinely contested and outside the scope of a pay and careers guide. If you're specifically interested in gender identity services as a career area, note that this particular service is no longer delivered by North London NHS Foundation Trust or its predecessor Tavistock and Portman trust; it now sits with the separate regional providers NHS England commissioned from 2024 onward.

What North London NHS Foundation Trust actually runs today

North London NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health services across five London boroughs — Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington — employing around 6,000 staff before the Tavistock and Portman merger (with the combined post-merger figure projected at roughly 6,800). Its services include adult, older adult and unified children's and young people's mental health services across the five boroughs, alongside more specialist national and regional provision covered below. Mental health nursing here follows exactly the same Agenda for Change bands as any other field — see our nursing guide for how progression works from Band 5 through senior practice and leadership roles — and psychologists and other allied health professionals working across the trust's community and specialist services are covered in our AHP guide.

Sites: St Pancras, Chase Farm, St Ann's and the National Eating Disorder Service

The trust's registered headquarters is at St Pancras Hospital in Camden. Its main inpatient and specialist sites include Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, Edgware Community Hospital, and Highgate West Mental Health Centre. St Ann's Hospital in Haringey is a particularly notable site: it's home to a national specialist Eating Disorder Service for people aged 18 and over, taking referrals from well beyond the trust's five home boroughs — a genuine national-reach specialism inside an otherwise locally-focused trust.

The North London Forensic Service

The trust's North London Forensic Service holds an Outstanding rating from the CQC, assessed and published separately from the trust's other core services. That's a genuinely strong, independently verified result — and worth knowing alongside the more mixed findings covered in the next section, since CQC ratings for specific services and the trust-wide picture can, and in this trust's case do, move in different directions at the same time.

CQC findings: an honest, mixed and serious picture

This is a trust where a single headline rating genuinely doesn't capture the current picture, so it's worth setting out the sequence of findings in full rather than picking one figure. An earlier comprehensive rating — published 28 January 2020, under the provider history the trust inherited — was Good. Since then, the picture has shifted, and not for the better on several core services.

A CQC inspection carried out between 10 February and 4 March 2025 was prompted by a series of patient deaths — eight between April 2022 and March 2024, and a further four in acute and psychiatric intensive care units between September 2024 and February 2025. That inspection identified 13 breaches of regulations, including issues with safe care and treatment, person-centred care, staffing levels (particularly at weekends, leading to delayed patient requests and escorted leave), and governance — for example, patients receiving medication not aligned with their Mental Health Act authorisations, and monthly team meetings not consistently taking place. The trust's well-led domain was rated Requires Improvement at this inspection, while caring and responsive were rated Good, and most of the 56 patients surveyed by CQC inspectors described staff as kind and approachable. A further, narrower inspection of acute wards for adults of working age and psychiatric intensive care units, published 24 July 2025, also rated those specific services Requires Improvement.

We're reporting this in full, rather than defaulting to the older 2020 Good rating, because the 2025 findings are more recent, more specific, and directly tied to patient deaths and identified regulatory breaches — genuinely material information for anyone considering a clinical role here, particularly on an acute or PICU ward. At the same time, the separately-rated North London Forensic Service's Outstanding rating is also real and current. Both facts describe the same trust; check the CQC's own current provider page for North London NHS Foundation Trust, and the specific service or ward you'd be joining, before making a decision.

NHS Staff Survey: what we could and couldn't verify

We could not independently verify a specific, current "would recommend as a place to work" percentage for North London NHS Foundation Trust from public sources at the time of writing. What is publicly documented is that the trust has set itself a target to raise that particular measure to 63% in a recent staff survey round — a stated improvement goal which, on its face, implies the trust's own leadership regards the current or recent baseline as sitting below that figure, though we don't have the precise prior-year number to confirm the size of the gap.

Pay, banding and a genuine Inner/Outer London HCAS split

Pay at this trust runs on the same national Agenda for Change pay bands as any other NHS trust — Band 2 through Band 9, plus medical and dental scales for psychiatrists. The trust's High Cost Area Supplement position is genuinely mixed, reflecting its merger history. Camden and Islington — the former Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust boroughs, and home to the trust's St Pancras Hospital headquarters — sit in the Inner London HCAS zone, currently worth 20% of basic salary. Barnet, Enfield and Haringey — the former Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust boroughs, including the Chase Farm and St Ann's Hospital sites — are all classified as Outer London instead, currently worth 15%. This is directly comparable to the mixed-zone pattern seen at East London NHS Foundation Trust, and it means two otherwise-identical posts at this trust can carry genuinely different HCAS depending purely on borough. Always check the specific base location on a job advert, and run the NHS Pay Calculator with that exact location rather than assuming a single trust-wide rate.

This trust vs East London NHS Foundation Trust

East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT) is a genuinely useful comparison — both trusts serve multiple London boroughs with a mixed HCAS geography and run dedicated forensic services, but their recent CQC and staff survey trajectories differ substantially.

The honest read is that these two trusts currently sit in quite different places: ELFT has a long, stable, well-documented positive track record, while North London NHS Foundation Trust is a much newer organisation (twice-merged within 18 months) still working through the consequences of a serious, patient-death-triggered CQC inspection. That doesn't mean every team or service at North London NHS Foundation Trust is affected equally — its forensic service's Outstanding rating proves the opposite can be true within the same trust — but it's a genuinely different starting point for a prospective applicant. Use the NHS Trust Comparison Tool to compare either trust against a specific role you're considering.

Why someone might specifically want to join

• A genuinely Outstanding-rated forensic service — the North London Forensic Service's separate CQC rating is a real, current strength distinct from the trust's other findings.
• A national specialist eating disorder service at St Ann's Hospital, offering specialist experience with a genuinely national referral base.
• Continuity of Tavistock's training reputation — the same postgraduate curricula, educators and University of Essex validation, now inside a larger organisation with potentially wider internal career routes.
• A trust actively working through identified problems — the 2025 CQC findings are serious, but they're also specific and named, which some staff may see as a clearer basis for targeted improvement work than a vaguer, unexamined problem.

Equally, anyone considering an acute ward or PICU role specifically should weigh the 2025 CQC findings — including the patient deaths that triggered the inspection and the regulatory breaches identified — seriously and ask direct questions at interview about staffing levels and what has changed since that inspection, rather than relying on an older or more general rating.

Tools for working out your own numbers

Job title and trust name alone won't tell you what a specific role here is actually worth, or how this still-settling trust compares with a more established employer — these three tools do that with your own numbers:

Your employer, not just your role

North London NHS Foundation Trust is your legal employer if you work here — including in a role that might once have been advertised under the Tavistock and Portman name — which is what continuous service and any redundancy pay calculation is based on. Given the trust's recent double merger, it's worth confirming clearly at offer stage which former organisation's terms, pension arrangements and base location apply to your specific post. See our explainer on NHS structure for the broader picture of how trusts, ICBs and NHS England fit together.

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Frequently asked questions