GP commissioners 'blow budgets'

GP commissioners overspent their budgets by a net 2.5% last year, according to an analysis by the Health Service Journal magazine.

HSJ examined the 2009-10 budgets and spending details of 190 practice-based commissioning consortia from 33 primary care trusts, which between them were allocated an indicative budget of £11.5 billion.

It calculates that by the end of the year, the commissioners had spent £11.8 billion, producing a net deficit of £289m.

The magazine says that “if the same scale of overspend was applied to the full NHS commissioning budget of £80 billion, it would generate a net deficit of £2 billion a year.”

The story is potentially significant, since the white paper, ‘Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS’ proposes to scrap strategic health authorities and primary care trusts and to hand secondary care commissioning to new GP consortia.

However, health secretary Andrew Lansley dismissed it on the grounds that holding an indicative budget for commissioning is far removed from the reforms that the government is pursuing.

"The whole point is that general practice should be making real decisions, with real implications for their patients' care, within real budgets," he said. "The Health Service Journal story is therefore nonsense." 

HSJ says 83% of the 190 consortia examined overspent their indicative budget last year, and that in just over half of the PCT areas every consortium was overspent, with some areas running up overspends of almost 8%.

The magazine obtained its figures from Freedom of Information Act requests to PCTs, a number of which were unable to provide 2009-10 data or report budgets and spending at a consortium level.

Link: Health Service Journal (paywall protected content).