NHS IT delays laid bare by £1.8bn underspend

The agency overseeing the £12.7bn revamp of NHS IT will have failed to spend £331m of its capital budget for 2008 according to forecasts.

It will be the fourth year in a row that NHS IT body Connecting for Health (CfH) has failed to spend all of its allocated capital funds, taking the total capital underspend for the agency since 2005 to almost £1.8bn.

Health minister Ben Bradshaw revealed the figures in a written answer to parliament on Tuesday, showing that while CfH's capital budget for 2008/09 was £917m, the forecast outturn was only £586m.

The agency blamed its ongoing spending shortfall on falling behind its timetable for implementing electronic medical records across England under the Care Records Service.

Patient administration systems that will handle the electronic records have only been deployed in a handful of health trusts and the CRS is now four years behind schedule.

Parliamentary spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee has been a longstanding critic of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and member Richard Bacon said he is amazed that the agency was on course to spend £586m on its capital programme in 2008 when so little had been achieved.

He said: "The fact that they have managed to spend so much and to get back so little is a rather depressing reflection on the amount of emphasis placed on the CRS, a fundamental mistake that we have been living with since the start of the project."

Bacon says that CfH should abandon the troubled CRS project in favour of letting trusts implement electronic medical records to be shared locally instead of nationally, a call echoed by the British Medical Association last month.

At the same time as consistently failing to spend its budget the projected cost of the NPfIT has almost doubled from £6.2bn to £12.7bn, as extra requirements were added on to many of its 10 projects.

But CfH claims that the underspend is a reflection of its tight controls on public money that sees contractors not getting paid until they have delivered technology to a satisfactory standard.

A CfH spokesman said: "£3.5bn of the £12.7bn budget for the National Programme for IT has been spent so far. Taxpayers' money is protected as suppliers are only paid when they deliver fully workable systems."

CfH also recently announced that the system that the GP2GP system, which allows electronic health records to be transferred between doctor's surgeries, had completed more than 500,000 electronic health record transfers.