Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 2 May 2016 to Question 139056 on Health Services: Finance, how much and what proportion of the £1.6 billion announced in Autumn Budget 2017 for allocation in 2018-19 has been used to commission services by (a) NHS Trusts and (b) independent healthcare providers.

In addition to the announcement in the autumn budget of an extra £1.6 billion of funding for the National Health Service, the Department added a further £540 million to bring the total to £2.14 billion which was allocated to the NHS as follows:

- £650 million is added to the Provider Sustainability Fund (previously the Sustainability and Transformation Fund) and so will be paid directly to NHS providers; and

- £1.49 billion has been allocated to NHS commissioners, predominantly for the purchase of secondary care activity and mental health services.

Commissioners are required to detail the total amount of planned expenditure for a given year but are not required to separately account for how the increase in the allocation from the previous year has been allocated, so it is not possible to identify how much of the additional money has been allocated to independent sector providers.