You are in > manchester.com  > News > NHS set for record surplus

Health

NHS set for record surplus

22/11/2007

The NHS is likely to have a record surplus of £1.8 billion by the end of this financial year, a new report has discovered.

Coming just two years after the NHS was more than £500 million in the red, the prediction has led to warnings of 'boom and bust' economics.

In August this year the health secretary Alan Johnson said the health service was on track for a surplus and is now "on a sustainable financial footing".

But the new surplus figures, obtain by the Health Service Journal (HSJ), are higher than the government's August prediction and show that £729 million of the surplus is made up of money 'top-sliced' from primary care trust (PCT) allocations by strategic health authorities (SHAs).

A source reportedly close to the Department of Health (DoH) told the HSJ that "there will be a lot of pressure on SHAs over the next few weeks to manage the situation closely and to bring the under-spend down".

But David Stout, director of the NHS Confederation PCT Network, said that it would be useful for NHS organisations to under-spend given the slow-down in resources in the coming year.

Commenting on the predicted surplus, Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said for the NHS to be on a cycle of "feast to famine and back to feast" is "the economics of the madhouse".

"These wild fluctuations between deficit and surplus are the symptoms of a vastly over-centralised system," he added.

"Power should be stripped from Whitehall bureaucrats to empower people with more control over their local health services."