MPs aghast’ at NHS bosses as overspending hits 1.4bn

Senior NHS leaders have been accused of remarkable” complacency and being out of ideas” to fix the UK’s broken health service as overspending doubled to 1.4bn last year.

- KATE DEVLIN

In a damning new report, MPs warned that a disregard for basic financial planning was hampering the health service’s ability to deliver for patients.

Although ministers have pledged to build an NHS “fit for the future”, the powerful Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said officials did not seem to have the “ideas, or the drive, to match the level of change required, despite this being precisely the moment where such thinking is vital”.

In a sign of the current state of the NHS, the health secretary Wes Streeting earlier this month said he could not rule out patients still being treated in hospital corridors next winter.

The chair of the committee, Tory MP Sir Geoffrey CliftonBrown, said: “The current government has told the public that the NHS is broken. This will not come as news to NHS patients, nor to its hard-working staff across the country.” But, he said, the committee was “aghast” at the “complacency displayed”.

His committee also hit out at officials from the Department of Health and NHS England for tending to blame the NHS’s poor financial position on factors like the “Covid pandemic, inflation and industrial action. While these undoubtedly have played their part, there are also well-known issues that are within officials’ control”.