• North Middlesex University Hospital Trust considering approaching Tottenham Hotspur for corporate partnership
  • Hopes to raise £300,000 a year from 20p surcharge on food and drink on match days
  • Also considering offering private procedures the NHS will no longer fund

A surcharge on food and drink sold on matchdays at a Premier League football ground is among the measures being considered by a cash strapped hospital trust.

Supporters and visitors to Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium could find themselves paying an extra 20p on each transaction to help ease the financial problems at nearby North Middlesex University Hospital.

The trust, which is near the stadium in north London, ended 2017-18 with a deficit of £29m.

Proposals in the trust’s board papers said the scheme could raise around £300,000 a year from 2020-21, from the 50,000 transactions on each of the 34 match days.

The plans said this would include: “League, domestic cup and European and NFL fixtures in a stadium with a capacity of more than 60,000.”

The trust described the model as “a strategic charity relationship with Tottenham Hotspurs FC, proposing adoption of a model used elsewhere in large commercial and sporting venues eg The O2 Arena, where a transaction based donation is suggested [in] addition to the cost of every food/drink order on match days”.

While most NHS trusts have an associated arm that fundraises, this is typically for non-core services like training or non-essential capital work.

A spokeswoman for the trust said it already had a “strong relationship” with the Spurs Foundation on some individual services but did not “currently have a corporate relationship with the club, and would like to explore this”.

North Middlesex is also considering offering to provide private services the NHS will no longer pay for.

The plans would see a “modest offering” of services including “procedures of limited clinical effectiveness” – such as tonsillectomies that clinical commissioning groups will no longer commission, claiming they are ineffective.

The unit would also aim to repatriate some of the work the trust’s consultants do privately at other facilities, particularly breast surgery and ophthalmology at three quarters of NHS tariff prices.

A spokeswoman for the trust said: “This is very much at the idea stage, and both these and the other ideas in that section of the paper were to demonstrate that we are open to considering a range of opportunities in order to ensure good local care and value for our communities.”

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