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.
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 chairman of the committee, Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, 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”.
The report found that despite doing 15 per cent more than before the pandemic, the NHS is actually less productive.
Despite employing 19 per cent more staff it is also only seeing 14 per cent more patients.
But an NHS England spokesperson said the report contained “factual inaccuracies” and productivity in the NHS had doubled compared with before the pandemic.
The committee complained that the “switch to digital in parts of the NHS has been glacially slow”, with some NHS trusts still relying on fax machines, while money intended for technology has also been redirected to plug spending deficits elsewhere.
The report also found that NHS England’s “long-held” ambition to move more care from hospitals to the community has stalled.
The PAC said that while the government’s ambition for the NHS represented a “golden opportunity”, leaders at the Department of Health and NHSE were not ready to prioritise the changes needed, instead arguing they were difficult and should occur slowly.
The cross-party committee also accused NHS England of being “overly optimistic” about improving productivity.
An ally of Mr Streeting said: “Pointless paperwork, stodgy process and a severe lack of urgency – this is exactly what Wes has been fighting against and he is determined to win. The whole system needs a proper shake-up and he’s the only person with the guts to do it.”
In September, Sir Keir Starmer laid out plans to bring in “three big shifts” in the NHS – moving more care out of hospitals and into the community, increased use of digital and greater prevention.
MPs warned the Department of Health’s and NHS England’s approach to NHS finances “is typified by short-termism”. Officials were also condemned for repeatedly failing to provide information about budgets in good time, something they described as a “disregard for basic principles of sound financial planning”.
An NHS England spokesperson said: “The report from the PAC contains basic factual inaccuracies and a flawed understanding of how the NHS and the government’s financial processes work.
“While NHS productivity is now improving at double pre-pandemic levels, far from being complacent, NHS England has repeatedly been open about the problem and the actions being taken to address it, including in the December public board meeting, and we will be publishing further improvement measures later this week in planning guidance.
“Reform is part of the NHS’s DNA and has ensured performance improvements for patients in the past year, including innovations such as virtual wards, despite the huge challenges the NHS has faced, including capital starvation, unprecedented strikes and a fragile social care sector.”
He said NHS England was working closely with the government to drive innovation forward “as we develop the ambitious 10-Year Health Plan to build an NHS which is fit for the future."
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We have been consistently clear that fixing the broken NHS and ensuring it is fit for the future requires urgent and radical reform.
“This will be a challenge, but health leaders in the NHS have said they will meet this task, and we will work with them to deliver it as part of our Plan for Change, as we shift healthcare from hospital into the community, from sickness to prevention and from analogue to digital.”
