That's a different government. From yours and the other replies, I see it is just a conspiracy theory. Of course it's possible for a government to reduce funding for departments to save money without the goal of privatizing them.
It is no conspiracy theory to simply observe what is happening whenever a right wing government leads a country long enough: the public services are enshittified to the point they lose any support from the population which justify them to partly or completely replace them with the false idea that competition among private companies will lead to better service.
Right-wing party platforms aren't a conspiracy theory, it's literally their platform.
"Starve the beast" isn't something the left made up to point and laugh at the right, it's just what the right does because they legitimately believe it works. And, in very rare cases, it does. But usually, privatizing just makes costs explode and inefficiency go through the roof as systems become horribly fragmented and opaque.
NHS is the National Health Service in the UK and this book was Co-Authored by the Minister for Health of the UK (before he got that post).
It details this strategy clearly.