The unaudited deficits for the NHS for 2005 / 2006 were announced
last week.
To my amazement, after a half-year estimate for a year end deficit of
£620 million, the deficit was £512 million. To me that this was
less than expected was unbelievable knowing the difficulties many
Trusts have had not being allowed to use brokerage, delayed payment of
bills, or other methods smacking of creative accounting for the first
time.
It appears that the Government themselves have done the brokerage for
this year by borrowing £765 million from somewhere to reduce the
deficit from £1.27 billion to the announced level.
I am attempting to find out what budget has been raided to lessen
this deficit.
I put down a "named day" parliamentary question and the
answer I received was, "I shall reply to the hon. Member as soon
as possible." How ridiculous! They must know where the money has
come from but, perhaps, not how to wrap it up to the least detriment.
During the last five years, several people have written to me about
underfunded occupational pension schemes that have been wound
up leaving them far short of their expected pension.
I have just had a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions
about the Financial Assistance Scheme and there is to be some
extension of this scheme and people who meet other qualifying
conditions and were within 15 years of their scheme's pension age on
14 May, 2004 may be eligible for tapered proportions of their expected
core pension depending on their age. The letter is detailed and
anyone who feels they might be affected please write to me at the
House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA for a copy of it.
The merger of the County's three Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) has
been rubber stamped as expected.
We are immediately going to lose key figures.
One of these is Eamonn Kelly, who has been our effective
and helpful Acting Chief Executive for 18 months. The only
consolation is that, as he is being promoted to a senior position in
the Strategic Health Authority, we can expect to have an ally at this
level.
With the merger of PCTs, we fear we will lose the local focus of
our own PCT namely the local Patient and Public Involvement Forum and
Professional Executive Committee.
For what it is worth, the Government has promised that the local focus
will remain but not how this will be achieved. At least the merger
will remove the anachronism that our Primary Care Centre and our
out-of-hours GP service are organised by two different Trusts.
Non-executive directors for the new countywide PCT are about to be
appointed and I have reminded the NHS Appointments Commission about
the importance of locally based non-executives on NHS boards since we
lost ours on the Acute Trust Board.
