Derbyshire CCGs’ Finances

Debate between Ruth George and Christopher Chope

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ruth George]

Actually, the alternative is correct. The CCGs in Derbyshire were managing absolutely fine until the five-year forward review in 2016-17. They were making surpluses, and there was no problem—particularly with North Derbyshire CCG, which covers my area and the hon. Gentleman’s area. It had surpluses and hit the 1% target underspend—[Interruption.]

[Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. It is intolerable that the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) should seek to intervene from a sedentary position.

[Ruth George]

The figures speak for themselves, as do the cuts to the county council, and as do all the other cuts that the CCG has had to make since the reduction in its funding increase in 2017, which I will set out in detail.

Last year, just after I was elected, our local dementia assessment and support ward in Buxton was axed. It was a gold-standard service that took the most difficult patients with dementia and helped them back into care in their own home in an average of less than six weeks. Our rehabilitation and support ward at Buxton, Fenton ward—the only place where acute patients in High Peak can be sent, as we have no nursing homes at all—is due to lose more than half its beds, despite the fact that a waiting list of patients in our acute hospital need those beds, even during the summer.

Community hospitals across Derbyshire are facing the loss of 84 beds. Bolsover Hospital and Bakewell have already closed, and staff at Clay Cross and Ilkeston hospitals are living with a threat to their wards. Anyone would think we were seeing a reduction in the number of patients with dementia, or elderly and frail people who need rehabilitation to get them home from hospital. Of course we are not. Instead, there has been an explosion in the need for those services at a time when our NHS is being forced to make short-term cuts that will have long-term implications for the care of our patients and for the skilled staff we need to keep in the NHS.

I had thought that the Government’s aim was to keep our long-term health costs down. Instead, cut after cut is forcing up costs—not just in the long term but immediately. The hours have been cut at our minor injuries units at Buxton and in Erewash. Our local A&E had an immediate increase in patients, which is costing the NHS even more. That A&E department, which usually sees 200 cases a day on average, rising to 250 in winter, has been seeing 300 patients a day over the summer. There has not been a spate of accidents; those patients have long-term illnesses that are not being managed because our local health services cannot keep up with the increased demand as they are not now being funded to do so.

It seems that, whichever service that helps people to stay out of hospital or long-term care one thinks of, it is being reviewed or cut. Our respite care for people with severe learning disabilities is one of the services that patients have been told is being reviewed due to the challenges it faces. My constituent Christine told me that her daughter Julie, who is 38 but has a mental age of eight, receives four or five days of respite care a month, and that is all that enables Christine and her husband to continue to care for her at home, as Christine is 62 and her husband 75. The alternative of permanent residential care would be far more expensive for the state to provide.

Specialist nurses who help people to manage very serious long-term conditions, including heart failure, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, are also proposed for cuts. After more outcries, especially from the GPs who would be shouldering that huge extra burden, those cuts have been put on hold until next year. The threat, however, is still there, and the specialists and the committed staff who run the service do not feel secure in their jobs.

Even funding for wound dressings has been removed. After suture removal and the first dressing, GPs are supposed to send patients with suppurating wounds to clinics many miles away, although often those patients have no transport. Otherwise, GPs have to pick up the burden themselves to prevent their patients from suffering serious infections, ending up in constant pain and back in hospital. In the case of our average small rural GP practice, that is 1.5 days of practice-nurse time a week. To keep that up is not sustainable.

Given all the rhetoric from the Department of Health and Social Care about sustainability, why is that happening? Why are short-term financial decisions impacting so hard on our frontline health services, on our voluntary services—which are vital as part of a long-term sustainable service—and on the frail and vulnerable people who need them? The short answer is finance. Finance has become the be-all and end-all for decisions on healthcare in Derbyshire. It is not an unusual area and we do not have particularly unusual health needs, apart from being more rural and having a slightly older age profile. The cost of our health needs, as in most areas, increases by about 3.5% a year.

Our CCGs were doing absolutely fine—meeting all their targets, delivering the required underspends and building up reserves—until the funding formula changed in 2016. North Derbyshire, for example, had a reserve of £20 million until, instead of the average CCG increase of 3.75%, North Derbyshire received only 1.6%. With a flat budget for 2017-18 and only a 2% increase for 2019-20, that is disastrous. The CCG was told by NHS England to find £16 million in cuts over six months during 2016-17. When that did not happen, it was placed in special measures and told to find cuts of 7% in 2017-18. However, long-term services with loyal staff cannot be cut that quickly, so again the deficit mounted.

Now Derbyshire’s four CCGs are applying to merge so that they can achieve the required efficiencies of scale and organisation. However, their combined deficit is now £95 million. NHS England has stipulated that if they can make £51 million of cuts, the other £44 million will be written off. That is all well and good, but it is dependent on those £51 million of cuts being made in just seven months. If the CCGs cannot make those cuts, they will have to find not only the £51 million but another £44 million. That is on top of the unmet extra costs of services next year of a further £21 million.

The Government claim that they are increasing spending on the NHS, but that is not what we see locally. Our communities see cut after cut after cut. Even the long-promised uplift of 3.5% a year from 2020 will only meet that one year’s increase in need; it will do nothing to deal with the huge backlog of cuts from a decade of austerity for our NHS.

Healthwatch Derbyshire has challenged the legality of the cuts, because they are being made at such speed that there is little assessment of the impact, let alone proper consultation. Much of the problem is that the benefits of the services that are being cut will not be measured financially—only their immediate cost. As far as NHS England is concerned, as long as £51 million of cuts are made, it does not matter that those cuts will increase costs by £151 million next year and every year thereafter. Furthermore, in the case of our voluntary sector and of our skilled specialist staff, when they are gone, they are gone. Voluntary services such as ours in Derbyshire take years of building up, of working with volunteers and of recruiting staff who are often prepared to be paid for only a few hours a week but who show absolute commitment to looking after their clients and volunteers. No one wants to make those cuts, but as the chair of one of our CCGs said:

“I wish that we had a regulator who would walk the path with us, and would look at the impact of these cuts, instead of simply demanding savings.”

That brings me to my question for the Minister. We should be nurturing our voluntary services and supporting our hard-working NHS staff, whose pay has been declining while their workloads have soared. We should be protecting our ever-growing numbers of frail, elderly and disabled patients, who have seen huge cuts to their social care and become ever more reliant on the health service, and working to integrate our health and social care budgets properly so that we do not see one service making cuts that cost the other even more. We should be building a sustainable health service fit for the 21st century. Please will the Minister tell me that NHS England will enable that to happen in Derbyshire?