Hunt ‘come clean’

The cash-strapped NHS could be spending up to ÂŁ15m on management consultants for advice on the secretive shake-up of the health service in England, Unite has warned today.

Unite, with 100,000 members in the health service, said that health secretary Jeremy Hunt needed ‘to come clean’ on the true cost of the expenditure on management consultants in relation to the 44 Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) for England.

The union said another major reconfiguration of the NHS, following hard on the heels of the controversial Health and Social Care Act 2012, could see closures or relocations of local hospitals and A&E departments.

Unite calculated the ÂŁ15m figure, after the media revealed that NHS chiefs in Coventry and Warwickshire had forked out ÂŁ343,000 to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for advice on saving money in their local STP plan.

If each of the 44 STPs spent a similar sum on management consultants, the figure could reach ÂŁ15m, as the NHS is enveloped in a winter crisis, reinforced by hard-hitting comments last week by the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens on the level of funding the NHS had received from the Tory government.

“It is very disturbing news from Coventry and Warwickshire that the management consultants are again scooping up loads of taxpayers’ cash to proffer advice on the local STP,” said Sarah Carpenter, Unite national officer for health.

“If this sort of spending was extrapolated across the 44 STPs in England we are talking about a figure of £15 million – Unite is calling on Jeremy Hunt to come clean on how much management consultants are being paid for so-called advice on STPs,” she added.

The 44 STP ‘footprints’ for the disparate geographical areas each have their own plans, which were prepared by mainly local NHS apparatchiks with no public involvement. The limited public consultation process was due to start this month, with implementation expected later in the year.

“Any such funds would be much better spent on frontline services, such as under pressure A&E departments, rather than on jargon-filled reports. The NHS is reeling from a starvation of cash. The health service is at crisis point and we have not yet reached the worst of the winter weather,” said Sarah.

“Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, is right to raise serious concerns at the insufficient level of NHS funding and an urgent financial injection into the health service is desperately needed,” she added.