Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Crisis at Trust - it's official!

Socialist Resistance no20  |  page 10-11

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Hands on -or hands off? Bradford hospital staff may feel that the way their Trust has been singled out for intervention as a result of relatively small deficits suggests that Foundation Trusts, far from being given more local freedom, are to be more tightly scrutinised than many other Trusts - and obliged to operate more like a regular

The advantage for ministers is that they have been able to wash their hands of the Bradford problems, and declare that they will no longer answer Parliamentary questions on the details of Foundation Trusts, since they are no longer controlled by the Department of Health! Financial watchdog body the Audit Commission has issued a dramatic "public interest report" confirming that the Mid Yorkshire Hospitals Trust finances are going from bad to worse.

The report, produced for the Commission by firm of auditors appointed to monitor the Trust, points to an already accumulated deficit of £20.8 million, and projects a shortfall of up to £40m by the end of the current financial year.

It warns that this would mean the Trust would be in breach of its statutory duty to break even, and has referred it to the Secretary of State.

The report if anything slightly more optimistic than the recent report to the West Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority, which projected a Mid Yorkshire shortfall of £46m by next March, comprising £30m of debts carried forward from last year, and an additional deficit this year of £16m.

In the spring, a potential deficit as high as £53m was revealed in the Wakefield Express, alongside proposals to freeze vacancies and spending on new developments.

Senior finance chiefs in the Trust and at SHA level seem to be living in denial, with plans for financial balance hanging on a massive programme of Cash Releasing Efficiency Savings to the tune of 246m, which still had not been identified in June.

Trust finance chief Tony Waite has again insisted that it was planning "savings" and aiming to restore financial balance "next year

The Mid Yorkshire Trust's chronic financial crisis is a major factor in its recent relegation to no-star status.