Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, when NHS (a) England and (b) Improvement received the Capped Expenditure Programme report for Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent.

As happens prior to the start of every financial year, the National Health Service was asked by the Department to develop a plan for balancing NHS budgets in 2017/18. As part of their plan, NHS England and NHS Improvement have designed and implemented the capped expenditure process (CEP), and they therefore have lead responsibility for it.

CEP is an extension of the annual planning process. Financial performance information for each clinical commissioning group (CCG) (and in total for CCGs) can be found in the quarterly published Financial Performance Reports, accessible via the link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/financial-performance-reports/

As with all public services, local NHS areas need to live within the budget agreed – otherwise they effectively take up resources that could be spent on general practitioners, mental health care, and cancer treatment. As part of their financial planning, NHS England and NHS Improvement have been running a process to look at how a small number of areas could do more to balance their financial plans, as many already have.

NHS England have published, at a national level, documents which describe the overall approach. Individual clinical commissioning groups directly affected will reflect the impact of the capped expenditure process as part of their publication of plans, and will comply with any further requirements for consultation.