Millions in taxpayers’ money spent on private consultants to plan NHS cuts The country’s biggest accountancy firms have made at least £17.6m to date helping the NHS draw up plans that will […]

The country’s biggest accountancy firms have made at least £17.6m to date helping the NHS draw up plans that will lead to the closure or downgrade of hospitals.

KPMG, McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) are among the big earners from health bosses paying management consultants to draw up the strategies, which earmark cuts to departments and some A&Es.

The figure, from Freedom of Information requests made by the Press Association, confirm what i revealed last month during a series of investigations into sustainability and transformation plans (STPs).

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“It will be galling for nurses, who have suffered a 14 per cent cut in real terms, to hear these figures.” Janet Davies, chief executive, Royal College of Nursing

STPs have been created in 44 regions in a bid to revolutionise services while saving money in the face of an expected £900m NHS deficit this year.

A Kings Fund report recently revealed that such extensive use of private management companies has caused disquiet among senior health service clinicians and executives. In some cases, managers felt pressured to increase their spend on the private companies.

“In one area, STP leaders even felt under pressure from NHS England’s regional team to increase the amount of money they were spending on management and consultancy support,” it said.

The latest figures show £17,674,998 has been spent so far, though the final bill is likely to be far higher. Eight out of 44 areas did not respond to the FOI requests, while others only provided partial data.

Biggest spend

Some of the biggest spends included south-west London, where bosses are reviewing services across five hospital sites. Some £4,158,311 has been spent on management consultants to create the STP, including £1,807,340 to PwC for “programme support”.

A further £477,715 was paid to PwC for “specialist commissioning work”, while Sirius received £50,399 for creating a “digital roadmap”.

KPMG was paid more than £1.2 million in total, according to the data, including £472,092 from Norfolk and Waveney STP bosses, £783,810 in Staffordshire and £26,393 in Hertfordshire for “cost modelling”.

In Northamptonshire, McKinsey was paid £500,000 for “support for development of STP care models”, while Nottinghamshire bosses also paid £195,000 to McKinsey for management support.

But some regions, including Lincolnshire and Dorset, used existing staff to create their STP and did not rely on management consultants.

Janet Davies, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “It will be galling for nurses, who have suffered a 14 per cent cut in real terms, to hear these figures.”

Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association, said STPs offered perhaps the only hope for transforming NHS services.

She said the charity’s chief concern was that the plans needed to engage patients fully. But she said there was “undeniably” a need for some up-front spending to get it right, including on consultancy support.

Four years of failure

Improvements were finally made at a failing hospital after it stopped “throwing money” at expensive interim bosses, its chairman said.

Medway NHS Foundation Trust in Kent was in special measures for nearly four years leading to it being called, in some quarters, one of the country’s worst.

At least £3.5m was spent on board-level interim appointments in the past five years, as dozens of senior bosses earned temporary packages of more than £100,000 a year.

In once case, the hospital paid £1.5m for an accountant to take charge of finances for 18 months, during which time the deficit tripled.

The deal, revealed by The Times, included £524,000 a year for the services of Tim Bolot as interim finance director and £441,000 a year for support services from five staff at his company. The arrangement came to an end last year.

Peter Carter, the current interim chairman, said that improvements at Medway had been possible only with a stable leadership team under a permanent chief executive, Lesley Dwyer.