NHS London Health & Social Care Directorate
John Bacon The Director of Health & Social Care London
In preparing for my Employment Tribunal Case I spent a lot of time working with the Panorama Team helping with them with the programme they transmitted on Sunday 29th June which was entitled "Fiddling The Figures". As well as appearing in the programme itself I also introduced to Panorama three of the other participants in the programme. As part of the work I did with the Panorama team they asked me to research my records to see if I could find out any other evidence of the misreporting of targets in the NHS. Although it did not fit in with their programme plan, which was about fiddling patient statistics, I did turn up a e-mail which I had received on the 18th June 2001, which explained how the London Office of the Directorate of Health & Social Care intended to eliminate the financial deficits that St George's Healthcare NHS Trust and the St Helier & Epsom NHS Trust had incurred for the financial year 2000/01. This e-mail in the words of Panorama's solicitor represented a clear misuse of public fund I remember clearly John Bacon saying shortly before I received this e-mail, that he was determined to ensure that all London NHS Trusts achieved financial balance that year and thereby meet their financial targets. Before I received the e-mail Trudi Simmonds who worked in the London Office as a financial analyst telephoned me to ask me if I could fiddle the creditor (money owed by the Trust to suppliers etc) or debtor (money owed to the Trust by various organisations) balances in the Trust's accounts to eliminate the financial deficit in order that the published accounts would then show that St George's had hit its financial target. I told Trudi Simmonds that I would not show false balances in the accounts of the Trust to pretend we had hit a target that in fact we hadn't and it was after this conversation that the e-mail was sent to me and the Director's of Finance of the St Helier Trust and Merton, Sutton & Wandsworth Health Authority. If you look at the e-mail what it shows is simple. The London Regional Office had agreed to give in effect a temporary loan to Wandsworth Health Authority equal to the amount of the financial deficits of the two Trust's added together, though no money was actually transferred, the health authority could show it in their accounts as being owed to them by the London office. The Health Authority then pretended in its accounts that this money was owed to the two Trust's allowing them in their accounts to show the same amount being owed from the Health Authority and thereby eliminating their deficits and showing a perfectly balanced financial position on the 31st March 2001 the end of the accounting period for which NHSTrust's have to produce accounts for publication at their Annual General Meetings. Because no money had actually changed hands the London Regional office was left with a problem, in that in theory it had given a temporary loan to Merton, Sutton and Wandsworth Health Authority which it needed to account for. With the need to publish the financial results now over, the solution which is outlined in the e-mail was simple, reduce the amount of money that the Trust's were entitled to receive in financial year 2001/02, thereby reinstating the Trust's deficit problem and use the taken away from the Trust's to repay the temporary loan. A neat and simple way of misleading the public and ultimately Parliament.
This issue has been covered in the local press with the Croydon Advertiser printing an article in May 2003. Comment has been made on this transaction by Lisa Ward Senior Press Officer for Health Minster John Hutton. In that response Lisa Ward suggests that this was a proper allocation from centrally held funds available for NHS spending. If that was the case why did the two NHS Trust's not spend the money. After all with all the pressing needs that an NHS hospital has to meet there would have been no shortage of items that the money could have been spent on. She goes on to say that the transactions were recorded in the accounts of the NHS bodies concerned were in accordance with NHS accounting rules and UK Generally Accepted Accounting Practice. This is a patently untrue statement as the fact that the funds had to be repaid in the following year meant that the accounts of all three bodies were being falsified as the liability to repay was being deliberately suppressed to produce the desired result which was the elimination of the financial deficits of the two NHS Trusts.
Who was responsible at the London Regional Office for authorising this course of action? I don't know exactly, but it clearly wasn't Trudi Simmonds as she would not have been senior enough to approve the temporary loan provision from the London Regional Office that was needed to make this scam work. More likely it would have needed the seniority of someone like John Bacon the Director of Health & Social Care or his Director of Resources Jonathan Wise. In any event whoever it was it is frightening that this kind of thing can happen within our public and leads one to the obvious question. Can you believe any of the performance target statistics produced by the NHS.