Baroness Redfern – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Redfern on 2016-09-15.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the relationship between those NHS Trusts in the greatest level of deficit and those with the highest proportion of private finance initiative income.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
In 2012, the Department identified a small cohort of major acute trusts where the private finance initiative schemes were one of the factors affecting financial sustainability. These trusts have been given access to a £1.5 billion support fund over a period of 25 years which has been available since 2013/14.
It is the role now of NHS Improvement to ensure that National Health Service trusts and NHS foundation trusts assess the impact of different expenditure items at NHS trusts to ensure that NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts have arrangements in place to secure financial health. NHS Improvement’s focus is then on supporting that individual provider to fix its financial problems, for example through interim financial support or longer term solutions in that health economy.
