Average CCG faces £10m topslice to pay for integration fund

A paper going to the organisation’s board meeting this Thursday states that the sum to be transferred from core commissioning group budgets to local authorities in that year will be “equivalent to around 3 per cent of CCG allocations”.

In last month’s spending review, the government unveiled plans to create a £3.8bn “pooled fund” between the NHS, the Department of Health, and the Department for Communities and Local Government for the joint commissioning of health and social care.

The money will be formally transferred to councils, with the majority of it coming from CCG budgets.

The document states: “£3.4bn of these funds will come from clinical commissioning budgets and will require substantial savings to be made in other costs.”

That £3.4bn comprises £0.9bn already transferred from the NHS annually to support local authority funded social care, an extra £0.2bn that will be added to that pot next year, £0.3bn of “reablement” funding and £0.1bn of carer’s break funding currently included in CCG allocations, and an extra £1.9bn topslice from CCG budgets.

The paper, by NHS England chief financial officer Paul Baumann, continues: “For the average CCG, the establishment of the integration fund will mean £10m of allocated funding will be transferred to the pooled budget (in addition to the pooling of reablement and carers’ breaks funding that is currently within CCG baseline allocations).

“This is in the context that the average CCG was allocated [around] £300m in 2013-14 and hence the figure is equivalent to around 3 per cent of CCG allocations.”

It suggests that the spending review settlement effectively means NHS England plans to develop a long-term strategy for the NHS will “need to be accelerated, with the first full year of implementation becoming 2015-16”.

The paper also notes that the DH agreed in the spending round to a further £300m administration savings in 2015-16, and that discussions are “ongoing” about how these cuts will be split between NHS England, CCGs and commissioning support units.