Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the potential effect of recent underspending nationally on depreciation on (a) the NHS estate and (b) NHS equipment over the next (i) five, (ii) 10 and (iii) 15 years; and if he will make a statement.

National depreciation budgets for all Government Departments are ring-fenced by HM Treasury and this means that underspends against that budget cannot be used for other types of spending. Therefore, any underspend (or overspend) against that budget will have no impact on National Health Service capital spending.

Depreciation spending in NHS providers does not form part of the ring-fenced national depreciation budget and the Department does not set depreciation budgets for the NHS provider sector. Individual providers fund depreciation spending through income received from NHS commissioners in return for the provision of healthcare services.

In terms of future NHS capital investment, the Autumn Budget 2017 announced £3.5 billion of new capital investment in the NHS by 2022-23, which comes on top of the £425 million of capital funding to support accident and emergency performance and to support locally-led sustainabilty transformation partnerships that was announced at the Spring Budget 2017.

Figures for ring-fenced national budgeted and outturn depreciation spending are shown in the following table.

As depreciation spending in NHS providers does not form part of the ring-fenced depreciation budget, the under spends shown above will mostly relate to central Departmental budgets such as the centrally-managed informatics programme, NHS property services and impairments of stockpiled vaccines.