WHERE IS OUR NHS MONEY GOING?

NHS England are stewards of the NHS's £95 billion budget. How it spends our money matters.

We know that roughly two thirds of its budget goes to local groups to buy care, with the rest spent centrally by NHS England on mainly specialised and primary care services.

However, unlike other government agencies, NHS England has never published details of where its money is going.

Since May 2010, government departments and their agencies have published monthly reports on all their spending over £25,000. This was a commitment to transparency that would allow taxpayers to see where money is being paid out and what it is going on, so that we could better judge if it is being spent wisely. This meant that we could see, for example, the amount of money the Department of Health paid to management consultants; how much was finding its way to companies with strong political links; and whether unpopular policies were draining resources.

Other NHS bodies, like the regulator Monitor[1], regularly tell us how they are spending our money. But, in the two years since it was established, NHS England has never once published this data.

NHS England says it is committed to transparency. And it is fast opening up and sharing other data on health services, including our personal data. NHS chief, Simon Stevens claims that NHS England “has set new standards for openness and transparency in all of its operations, compared with what went before.” This is not the case.

In August NHS England said it would publish its spending data in September. Then it said by the end of October. It has yet to publish it. Don’t let NHS England kick the can down the road. Tell them that you want to see how it is spending our money now.

Thanks to pressure from 38 Degrees, earlier this year NHS England made a commitment to publish details of its top executives' meetings with private companies. We can put pressure on them now to do what they should have been doing all along: tell us where the money is going.

We are repeatedly warned about the NHS’s dire financial situation. We hear of hospitals facing bankruptcy, services being rationed, and the need for massive savings to be made if the NHS is to survive. But first, we need to see that the stewards of the NHS budget are spending with care and where it matters.

Tell Simon Stevens to come clean about how NHS England spends our money.

Notes
[1] Monitor spending over £25,000, April 2010 - June 2014: http://data.gov.uk/dataset/financial-transactions-data-monitor