- DH returns nearly £3bn to Treasury
- Burnham demands investigation after HSJ reveals claw back
- Commissioning board could force CCGs to work with its teams on reconfiguration
- University Hospitals Bristol FT receives CQC warning notice
4.26pm Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham is to write to the chair of the UK Statistics Authority to look at government claims about the NHS budget after HSJ revealed the scale of the claw back of health money by the Treasury.
In a statement Mr Burnham urged the prime minister to be “straight with the public on his government’s record on NHS funding”.
“On the very same day he was boasting to the Commons about increasing NHS spending, we learn that George Osborne has made another £1billion raid on the NHS budget,” Mr Burnham said.
“The government promised any savings would be reinvested in the NHS, but the Department of Health has handed one billion back to the Treasury in the last year alone - twice as much as feared in March.
“The prime minister should not be allowed to make inaccurate claims week after week on the NHS budget. So I am today writing to Andrew Dilnot to ask him to look this and set the record straight.”
2.26pm And more reaction on Twitter. Howard Catton says: “So nurses who’ve been telling us they had seen no sign of savings being reinvested weren’t wrong then.”
2.20pm Some reaction has come in to HSJ’s revelation the DH has returned nearly £3bn of its funding to the Treasury over the past two years:
Anonymous: “Frankly this is an utter disgrace; with so much funding being taken out of the system there is little or nothing left to invest in creating the new services necessary to ensure that the ‘efficiency programme’ doesn’t simply turn into a massive cut in services.”
Roger Kline: “Astonishing. No doubt greeted with disbelief by those managers and staff dealing with the consequences of underfunding.”
1.04pm The Care Quality Commission has issued University Hospitals Bristol Foundation Trust with a warning notice after discovering insufficient “qualified, skilled and experienced staffing” on its children’s paedeatric ward. The inspection was sparked by concerns from parents whose children had died at the trust.
12.41pm The Department of Health has returned nearly £3bn of its funding to the Treasury over the past two years, despite facing its tightest financial settlement for five decades. For the full figures on how much has been returned to the Treasury in recent years see Crispin Dowler’s exclusive story.
12.24pm NHS commissioners will be able to use their new spending powers to benefit local people and communities, the NHS Confederation’s deputy director of policy, Jo Webber has written. Her full article is in today’s Guardian.
12.17pm The NHS Commissioning Board will have the ability to force clinical commissioning groups to work with centrally appointed groups of doctors on reconfiguration programmes, HSJ has been told. The board could impose “bespoke conditions” on CCGs’ authorisation, although one board source expected this power would only rarely be used.
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