Sounds like a good initative, Public services should be using FOSS... the NHS used to get massive discounst on software from companies like Microsoft but in 2010/11 the new government forced each NHS Trust to managed their own IT and licencing. So when the generous licence agreements ended (which had encouraged proliferation of some proprieatry software) many Trusts were stuck with enormous bills to true up or purchase new agreements at less attractive rates - I suspect the easy solution in some cases was to simply not upgrade and just sweat old licences...
..But this is only one contributing factor in the failure of NHS IT. Many of the IT staff/management I have met who work for the NHS are not the best even if keen (let's face it the NHS does not pay google wages), and NHS senior managers have a nasty habit of using over priced big name consultantancies to manage their projects.
Successful IT is People, Process, & Technology/Tooling. Unfortunately NHSbuntu can only address one corner of the triangle but it's promising. I wish them all the best.
This is incorrect. All of the nhs are still listed under one main govt microsoft contract, each merely have their own enrolment where they all fit under the best level possible for pricing. They would all have a seperate enrollment, but the NHS as a whole is under the one main agreement.
should use suse
That certainly wasn't the case for the parts I worked with about 4 years back. Some trusts were in a real mess with things like SQL licencing / they needed to true up and convert processor to core licences. Many large orgs have multiple agreements with MS, I've rarely seen everything under a single EA or SCE type deal.
Hopefully some of the problem areas have now been sorted out and its more like how you describe - as much as we like to vilify MS on these forums they were genuinely trying to help the NHS get into the best licence position when I was involved so it could be that side of things is now much better. I'd imagine that even if NHSBuntu replaced a lot of desktop OS' in the NHS Windows Server would remain for a long time to come on server systems.
If they sat down in front of a PC running Suse KDE or Ubuntu KDE or Fedora KDE would they tell the difference?
My god that SQL per core license...
Maybe something not canonical? Just my two cents. 
It would be better because a lot of stuff similar to AD and LDAP is packaged in with open suse.
I bet at one point there will be a bribed crook in top managment level doing everything in his power to stop NHS going open-source. Just like what's currently happening in German city.
This ^
They need to expect a full frontal assault from Microsoft.
Generally on large agreements like that there are concessions made, can't really go detailed on it.
They wouldn't be allowed have non ms stuff under the agreement asEA/EAS commitment is enterprise wide, so even if they were using linux on a "line of business" machine, example something that came from the factory running linux, it still generally needs a cal and windows purchased for it. This is why enterprise is comparatively cheap compared to MPSA/select etc, You're covering all the thousands of machines and getting massive discounts for that.
Edit: Generally things are ALWAYS under an EA/EAS//SCE type deal, the MBSA has a master agreement under it, which covers all of the affiliates and where the price levels etc come into play, all of the enrolments then under that master agreement benefit from the aggregated price levels accrued by all of the enrolments under it. I could go very detailed but wont cos it's probably a breach of NDA or something.