OK, now listen to this because you couldn’t, as they say, make it up.
You know how much pressure we are under to cut costs and rationalise services in light of the current austerity programme, don’t you? And you will have noticed that your pension contributions are increasing at an eye-watering rate, and that your money is being poured into the black hole of NHS finances rather than salted away to fund future pensions, as has been the (mal)practice of successive governments?
Knowing all that, you will be as delighted as I was to learn that Andrew Lansley is indulging in one of those old end-of-year mindless spending binges that we hoped had become a thing of the past.
As I discovered when I dropped in to work today for one of my twice-weekly locum sessions, and as reported in the Health Service Journal a few days ago, trusts (well, a few of them) have been told that there is a capital sum of £300m available - that’s 6.7% of the total available for the year - and that the DoH is inviting bids against it. The closing date for those bids - which must be for at least £5m? The 12th of January. That’s right - today. Although NHS London sent a letter announcing the bonanza on 23 December, many others have still not been informed about the end of year (?closing down) sale.
A colleague in Leeds first heard about it from a representative of one of the leading manufacturers of radiology equipment, who was asking if we would be directing any of the largesse their way. Well, we could easily spend four or five million on a PET/MR scanner, or a cyclotron for our existing PET/CT scanners, and even justify it to ourselves, but is this any way to allocate scarce resources in the middle of a funding drought?
This is just another example of crass incompetence at the highest level in Whitehall. How can they seriously expect trusts to produce fully-costed business cases for expenditure of this magnitude in a few days? Also, of course, many PCTs and trusts seem to know nothing about it even now, and so any distribution which does occur will be seriously skewed. It’s a recipe for waste on a grand scale in a department of state that has already set records for profligacy with its failed connecting for health programme.
As one of the PCT directors interviewed by the HSJ put it: “Get your bids in by 6 January for schemes that must be over £5m, preferably spent by end of March?…We haven’t seen this kind of thing in about 10 years. The ‘use it or lose it’ at short notice mentality went away for a long time. Seems it’s back.” Back indeed, and with a vengeance.
If you wonder how Lansley will explain this lunatic behaviour, wonder no longer. A DoH spokesperson said: “Thanks to good management of central capital budgets, we have identified capital funding which could be made available to the NHS. We are now in discussions with the NHS to see how it could best be spent“. So there you have it - contrary to what you had been thinking, this is an example of good management. As, presumably, was Liverpool’s purchase of Andy Carroll for £35m and £80K a week (and at least he has put the ball in the back of the opponent’s net on four occasions, whereas Lansley only seems capable of scoring own goals).
It’s difficult to know if the delayed and ‘hole-in-the-corner’ way in which the information concerning this fund was released is a deliberate attempt to keep bids against it to a minimum, or just another example of administrative incompetence. However, the fact that one half of the DoH apparently didn’t know what the other half was doing would tend to favour cock-up over conspiracy - in the early afternoon of 5 January the DoH spokesman denied that any such fund existed; later that same day they confirmed that Lansley had indeed authorised the release of the cash. Presumably at some point he will blame Nick Clegg.
What a bunch of wasters (no - literally).
