Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what formula determined the level of NHS funding for devolution to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

The Department and NHS England are working closely with Greater Manchester to develop the devolved arrangements that will be implemented from April 2016. The Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Devolution Memorandum of Understanding has identified around £6 billion of health and social care funding which has currently been allocated at the full Greater Manchester level.

The large majority of total health funding for England is allocated to NHS England by the Department. NHS England is then responsible for making allocations of funding to individual clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), which are responsible for commissioning most local health services. Decisions on CCG allocations are taken independently of Government by NHS England. What the Government does is to set some broad principles, as part of the Mandate to NHS England, to which they must conform.