NHS England has settled a dispute with clinical commissioning groups in the south of England over its proposal to transfer £50m from their budgets to its own specialised commissioners.
The national body had asked for £49.6m to be transferred from CCGs in the region in 2014-15, but the sum was reduced to £32.4m following arbitration.
The reason given for the transfer was to correct inaccurate allocations that were made when budgets were divided between CCGs and NHS England after the abolition of primary care trusts. NHS England reported in July last year that specialised commissioners in the south of England could only balance their financial plans for 2014-15 if they received a £50m budget transfer from CCGs in the region.
But the proposal was contested by CCGs across Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Medway, that argued the allocations had already been corrected in 2013-14, when hundreds of millions of pounds were transferred to NHS England by CCGs across England. A spokesman for some Sussex CCGs warned at the time: “Any material change to our allocation will not only affect the CCGs’ ability to deliver our financial plans in 2014-15 but could also risk the delivery of local services for patients.”
An arbitration panel was put together, comprising a CCG chief finance officer and an area team finance director from a different region.
Following the arbitration, Surrey and Sussex CCGs were allowed to keep £13.4m of the £26.1m NHS England had requested.
Kent and Medway CCGs wrote a joint letter to NHS England protesting against the budget transfer. They had been asked to pay back £6.6m, but this was reduced to £2.8m following arbitration.
A further £16.9m was transferred back to NHS England from Wessex CCGs and providers that had commissioned services from Wessex. NHS England required £20m from the Wessex area in order to balance the area team’s budget, according to July’s board paper.
Surrey Downs CCG contested the £4.7m they were asked to return to NHS England because they said this had already been paid the previous year as a “non-recurrent adjustment”.
However, they were eventually forced to transfer the full amount.
A spokeswoman from NHS England (South East) said: “We have worked through a complex process with our partner clinical commissioning groups across Kent, Surrey and Sussex to agree final baseline transfers from the CCGs to fund specialised services that are now commissioned by NHS England. This process was to correct funding allocations that were made at the time of transfer of commissioning responsibilities to NHS England and Clinical Commissioning Groups.”
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