Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much of his Department's budget for NHS providers' capital was transferred to revenue spending in each year since 2009-10; and what the capital budget and revenue budget was for NHS providers in each of those years.

The Department has twice transferred funding from the Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (CDEL) to the Revenue Departmental Expenditure Limit (RDEL) since HM Treasury’s Supply Estimates and budgetary controls were changed under the Alignment (Clear Line of Sight) Project (part of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill 2010).

1. 2014-15 –

- £640 million was transferred from the Department’s group CDEL budget to the RDEL as part of the 2014-15 Supplementary Estimates exercise.

- No adjustments were made to the National Health Service trust or foundation trust CDEL spending plans to fund this transfer.

2. 2015-16 –

- £950 million was transferred from the Department’s group CDEL budget to the RDEL as part of the 2015-16 Supplementary Estimates exercise.

- A full explanation of how this transfer was funded was supplied to the Health Select Committee and this has been published on the UK Parliament website, via the following link:

https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/Health/Department-of-Health-15-16-Supplementary-Supply-Estimate-Offsetting-mitigations.pdf

- The relevant narrative on the transfers is extracted below –

a. No specific programmes have been stopped. Savings have been achieved via slippage on original planned trust capital, in line with previous years - NHS trusts approximately £0.3 billion, foundation trusts approximately £0.5 billion.

Plus benefits from centrally managed programmes, in the main relating to the budgetary impact of an amendment to the NHS Supply Chain Consumables contract. This amendment prompted a review of the accounting arrangements, which concluded that NHS Business Services Authority now has control over Supply Chain activities – therefore the transactions will be consolidated into their own financial statements. The financial asset (investment in NHS Supply Chain) has been replaced with inventory, receivables and creditors, generating a net credit to the CDEL outturn.

Whilst spending by NHS trusts and foundation trusts does impact on the Department’s group RDEL and CDEL controls, they are not allocated budgets directly by the Department. They fund their activities via income received from trading relating to provision of healthcare services, from NHS England and clinical commissioning groups.