Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con): If the Secretary of State and Opposition Members do not believe our figures, perhaps they will believe Unison's. My friends at Unison have supplied us with a nice document that tells us that the deficit is £200 million in the eastern region alone. Unless the rest of the country has a tiny deficit, someone is telling porky-pies.
Mr. Lansley: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. Indeed, in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridge, the strategic health authority predicted a £92 million deficit in its area alone.
Two years ago in 2002–03, there were 71 deficits. In 2003–04, there were 106 deficits and by 2004–05 there were 167 deficits, including foundation hospital trusts. As I said this year, the projected deficit is £1 billion, far in excess of last year's. The Department of Health has already set control totals approaching £350 million, but one has little confidence in its ability to exercise financial control. The chief executive of the Department, in a memo leaked last week to the Health Service Journal, said that the NHS is
"tightening financial discipline after a spurt of growth in which increased income sometimes allowed people to forget good financial discipline."
That is from the accounting officer for the Department of Health. It is little wonder that three months after the end of the financial year the Secretary of State could be nearly 100 per cent. out on the out-turn figures for NHS finances.
NHS trusts have a statutory duty to break even, which is generally interpreted as allowing one financial year to be taken with another, but at this rate they will have to put two or three financial years together. We are now in the fourth year of rising deficits. Many PCTs and trusts have breached their requirements to live within resource limits or external finance limits. In several parts of the country, there is a risk of financial collapse. | 
