Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much the NHS has spent from the public purse in compensation payouts in each year since 2010-11.
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 |
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 |