Some trusts will not become FTs until 2018, says Flory

David Flory last week told the Commons public accounts committee that some of the NHS trusts it is responsible for will not attain foundation trust status until 2018 – two years later than the latest expected date when the organisation was set up in 2012.

Mr Flory told MPs the organisation’s latest information was that some trusts would become licensed by Monitor within two years, some within four, and that there was a final group of trusts whose future organisational form was not clear.

Trusts were required to submit five year plans to the TDA in June to make clear their strategic position and whether they could continue in their current form.

HSJ understands some of the unsustainable trusts will be announced in January.

The admission from Mr Flory to the committee suggests the TDA will continue to exist until at least 2018, but no one from the arms-length body would comment on this in response to an HSJ request.

The TDA was created in April 2012 and since then, the number of trusts in the pipeline has reduced from 104 to 93.

Former health secretary Andrew Lansley had promised in 2010 that all NHS trusts would become FTs by April this year but progress has been slow.

Delays to the process have been caused by an increasing workload for acute trusts, changes to the quality thresholds trusts must meet, and a review of provider organisational forms by Salford Royal FT chief executive Sir David Dalton – which has yet to report.

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Proposals to have some trusts managed by private firms, like Circle Partnership do Hinchingbrooke Health Care Trust, have also foundered.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham last week said a Labour government would consider changes to the foundation trust model.

In April Alan Milburn, who created foundation trusts while he was Labour health secretary, called for the TDA to be scrapped and all providers to be made foundation trusts.

In March outgoing NHS England chief executive Sir David Nicholson told HSJ that a policy of getting all trusts to foundation status could not be implemented and that people were “using lots and lots of energy flogging a [foundation trust] model which is not going to work in the future”.

The policy was defended by the Foundation Trust Network.

Last September Jeremy Hunt said many trusts had made “unacceptable compromises” to patient care in an effort to meet the financial standards required of aspirant foundation trusts.