Finance and spend

I would like to request a complete breakdown of all NHS spending and expenditure for the most recent full financial year. I am seeking a comprehensive account of how the entire NHS budget is allocated and spent, covering all categories and sub-categories of expenditure, including every item and contract where possible.

Specifically, I am requesting all spending information across the NHS, including but not limited to:

• Staffing costs (all salaries, benefits, training, recruitment, agency staff, consultancy fees, etc.
• Hospital and primary care service expenditure
• Administrative and management costs
• Procurement and contracts (medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Information Technology (IT), external services, etc.)
• Capital projects (buildings, infrastructure, IT systems, digital programmes)
• Payments to private providers, charities, and third-party organisations
• Regional, Trust-level, and other local allocations of funding
• Research and development expenditure
• Any other areas of expenditure not listed above.

I request this information at the most detailed level available, including line-by-line or transaction-level data if such records exist, so that every pound spent can be accounted for.

If the complete dataset is too large to be provided by email, please advise on the format in which it is held and how it can be accessed. My preference would be to receive the information electronically, ideally in an open format such as Excel or CSV.

Response:

Section 12 FOI Act 2000 - Cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit.

The Trust will not be disclosing this information on the grounds of cost, as locating and extracting the information will exceed the cost limit. You may be aware that under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for the NHS is £450 (based on £25 per person per hour to locate and extract the requested data. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending more than 18 hours, as we have established that providing this information would require a manual audit of relevant records to be carried out.

Please find more information about section 12 on the gov.uk website

Please see the breakdown below, Cost of Compliance.

To clarify the transactional detail level: 12 months’ worth of data comprises over one million lines, which would need to be reviewed by a band 7 to ensure that personal staff/patient data is not included or is sanitised.

Section 21 FOI Act 2000 - Information accessible to applicant by other means

The Trust will not be disclosing this information on the grounds that it is accessible to the applicant by other means. Therefore, the Trust considers the information to be exempt under section 21 (Information accessible to applicant by other means) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Please visit the annual reports section of our Trust website for more information.

I am writing to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for information held by your organisation regarding the delivery of interpretation services and expenditure related to this.

I would be grateful if you could provide the following information:

1.         Annual spend on interpretation services

 For the financial years 2022/23, 2023/24, and 2024/25 to date, please provide:

a.         The total annual spend on interpretation services.

b.         A breakdown of this spend by mode of delivery (in-person/face-to-face interpreting, telephone interpreting, video interpreting).

 2.         Interpretation services provided

 For the financial years 2022/23, 2023/24, and 2024/25 to date, please provide:

a.         The total number of appointments (and if possible, interpreting hours) delivered per year.

b.         A breakdown by mode of delivery (in-person/face-to-face interpreting, telephone interpreting, video interpreting).

 3.         Fulfilment of interpreting requests

a.         Please provide the percentage of in-person/face-to-face interpreting requests that were successfully delivered in each of the above financial years.

 4.         Languages Currently Available

Please provide a list of languages for which interpretation services are currently available, broken down by mode of delivery (in-person/face-to-face interpreting, telephone interpreting, video interpreting).

Response: The annual spend for the last financial year (FY), FY24/25, was: £1,439,322.03

Annual spend FY22/23: £609,134.55

Annual spend FY23/24: £652,312.59

It would take at least 122 hours to respond to your request.

The Trust will not be disclosing this information on the grounds of cost, as locating and extracting the information will exceed the cost limit. You may be aware that under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for the NHS is £450 (based on £25 per person per hour to locate and extract the requested data. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending more than 18 hours, as we have established that providing this information would require a manual audit of relevant records to be carried out.

What were:

1. The number of patients processed by your Trust between the years 2018 and 2025 who were classified as having a chargeable status?

Response: This information is not centrally collated, so we are unable to report on this, as we do not hold the information.

Our Operational and Finance Teams are not aware of the care provided during this period, which was classified as being chargeable. Given the portfolio of services provided by the Trust, we have an allocation within our block contract for foreign nationals requiring emergency treatment, and, in these circumstances, individual billing arrangements do not apply.

2. The number of individuals in receipt of secondary care who, under the ‘NHS Charges to Overseas Visitors Regulation, 2015’, were classified as “Charging Category F”?

Response: This information is not centrally collated, so we are unable to report on this, as we do not hold the information.

3. The total value of the treatment provided to those individuals who were classified as falling under “Charging Category F”?

Response: Nil.

4. Please also confirm whether your Trust has an Overseas Visitor Manager position(s), the total number, and whether all roles are presently filled.

Response: We do not have an overseas visitor manager.