NHS: Negligence

(asked on 9th July 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much has been spend from the public purse by the NHS in defending court cases in each year since 2010.


Answered by
Steve Barclay Portrait
Steve Barclay
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
This question was answered on 17th July 2018

Regarding spend defending court cases since 2010, the National Health Service has been interpreted as NHS providers and commissioners. This includes NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts and NHS England and clinical commissioning groups.

Spend on legal fees in the NHS is shown in the following table:

Year

Total legal fees (£000s)

2013-14

110,747

2014-15

171,806

2015-16

162,273

2016-17

172,135

Expenditure on legal fees is not analysed by the purpose of the fees, and it is therefore not possible to provide a further breakdown to isolate costs incurred relating to the defence of court cases.

Prior to 2013-14 expenditure on legal fees was not separately classified by primary care trusts, strategic health authorities who both carried out NHS commissioning and NHS trusts. Therefore comparable information pre 2013-14 is unavailable.

There is no specific category of expenditure that isolates spend relating to compensation payouts in the NHS. Therefore NHS spend on compensation payouts has been interpreted as the utilisation of provisions raised by NHS Litigation Authority, whose operating name is NHS Resolution. NHS Resolution is responsible for handling negligence claims on behalf of NHS bodies. The indemnity schemes managed by NHS Resolution relate to both clinical and non-clinical schemes.

The unwinding of provisions raised within the NHS Resolution managed indemnity schemes is shown in the following table:

Financial Year

Total NHS Resolution
Provisions Unwound
£000s

2010-11

911,379

2011-12

1,329,761

2012-13

1,309,479

2013-14

1,244,113

2014-15

1,223,020

2015-16

1,547,824

2016-17

1,764,660

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