Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether the NHS Mandate and Constitution continues to apply to areas subject to the capped expenditure process.

The Government is committed to increasing the National Health Service budget to ensure patients can get the care they need. NHS spending will increase by £8 billion in real terms by 2020-21, from a baseline of 2015-16 and for the first time to deliver an increase in real funding per head of the population for every year of the Parliament.

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 has advised that none of the submitted plans will have a detrimental effect on diagnostic services for cancer. All NHS services must be consistent with the NHS Mandate and Constitution. But it is right that the NHS should consider efficiency savings such as reducing delayed transfers of care, or reducing running costs – because this improves patient care overall.