The must-read stories and debate in health policy and leadership.
Speaking last year, the Department of Health and Social Care’s number two, Shona Dunn, was adamant that the health service had moved on from its self-destructive habit of cutting long-term investment budgets to pay for today’s bills.
The top civil servant told MPs that so-called capital-to-revenue transfers were “not something that we would want to do as part of normal financial management” and “certainly not something that we now do”.
Yet just a few months on, the NHS has been forced to do exactly that.
Nearly £1bn has been transferred out of capital funds to prop up day-to-day spending this year, new Treasury documents reveal.
The raids were prompted by the government’s refusal to provide extra cash for strikes and pay deals.
These pressures are self-evidently outside the NHS’s control, but the health service is being asked to pick up the tab regardless.
Around £300m for tech has been axed, alongside £200m from the flagship New Hospitals Programme.
A DHSC spokesman insisted the exercise was a “targeted, limited and non-recurrent transfer to meet a specific and unforeseen pressure”.
A tender issue
Trust spending on agency staff is going to come under increasing scrutiny in the coming year as financial pressures mount across the health service.
There’s no doubt that if agency staffing spend is pressured there will be even greater focus on any spending that happens off-framework, with recruitment and staffing firms that do not sit on one of the approved procurement routes for trusts to hire in additional workforce.
This is the context therefore that surrounds a case before the High Court, in which a recruitment agency has brought claim against an NHS foundation trust (in its role as host for a procurement collaborative) for leaving it off a key clinical staff framework.
NL Group has said its exclusion was unlawful, that its bid was scored too low on multiple questions during the evaluation process. The trust has denied this, saying the evaluators acted lawfully and scored the tender correctly.
Also on hsj.co.uk today
In Recovery Watch, James Illman says that system leaders hope encouraging results from a group of 25 trusts can provide a blueprint for others to follow on eliminating long waiters. And we report that strike action by healthcare assistants looks set to spread to more trusts, having so far been confined to the North West.
