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1/31/2012
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Government could save over £1 billion if it drops health bill, says leading professor
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Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has been under intense pressure to drop the health and social care bill.
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The government could save more than £1 billion in 2013 if it chooses to abandon its health and social care bill, according to an influential healthcare professor.
Kieran Walshe, professor of health policy and management at Manchester Business School, has suggested that although the coalition has made cuts at it strives to save £1.5 billion a year in reduced administrative costs, as part of the wider goal of £20 billion of efficiency savings by 2015, the reforms themselves would be expensive to run.
Citing the cost of setting up the NHS Commissioning Board, whose annual running costs could reach almost £500 million, 260 Clinical Commissioning Groups across the country and the new economic regulator Monitor, Walshe claimed the government could save over £1 billion next year.
“Abandoning the bill would save a lot of money. The government claimed that the proposed NHS reforms would save at least £1.5bn a year in reduced administrative costs, largely from abolishing PCTs and strategic health authorities, although the arithmetic in their impact assessment has been contested,” he wrote in the British Medical Journal.
“However, most of those savings have already been made, through reductions in staff numbers and clustering of PCTs and strategic health authorities, and the current transitional structure is probably leaner and less costly than any the NHS has known in the past two decades.
“Going ahead with the bill means setting up the NHS Commissioning Board (with an annual running costs of £492m), 260 clinical commissioning groups (with an annual running costs of £1250m), and the new economic regulator, Monitor (with its anticipated annual running costs of £82m).
“Each of these new statutory organisations will have additional set-up costs, perhaps amounting to a one-off spend of £360m. If the bill were stopped now, it would save all those set-up costs, and at least £650m in annual running costs - just over £1bn in 2013.”
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