The chief executive of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHRUT) warned Labour is imposing cuts the likes of which he has never seen in his career.
“It’s going to be a very, very hard year, I think,” Matthew Trainer told a board meeting last month.
“I can’t remember having to do a savings programme of this scale in my time in the NHS and I think it’s taking us into quite radically new territory.”
The trust – which runs Queen’s Hospital in Romford and King George Hospital in Ilford – has already cut £30m from its budget for the past two years in a row.
Mr Trainer warned the board major cuts were looming, despite the Romford A&E having the busiest winter in its history, with “shameful and difficult” images in the media of its corridors filled with patients.
“We are seeing really significant, double-digit increases in attendance,” he said, adding: “We are lucky we haven’t seen anything worse happen there.”
Nonetheless, he told January’s board meeting: “Our expectation next year is that we are going to have to deliver a savings plan in excess of £50million – which is taking us into the kind of territory that trusts rarely reach in terms of percentage of income.”
He warned the trust faced “really hard decisions”, including “deliberate decisions to constrain access to services”.
A cut of £50million was equivalent to 770 full-time jobs, he said.
The trust now says it will actually need to cut £61m.
Mr Trainer came back before the board in March, telling members he’d recently met Labour health secretary Wes Streeting – local MP to many of the trust’s patients in Ilford North – at an event in Parliament.
He said Mr Streeting had “some very clear messages about what the expectations are of the NHS over the next couple of years – and I think we can see it right across the public sector, actually. We can see what local authorities are facing with their budgets as well.”
The looming cuts, Mr Trainer said, were “going to involve us doing more than continuing to tighten belts in places.
“I think we’ve tried to do the kind of ‘more for less’ for years. This is about less for less in some instances as well.”
The trust would have to “restrict access to certain services in a way that we think will cause the least harm as an outcome”.
The trust hopes to find £7.5m by cutting 115 whole time equivalent posts in corporate services, through a combination of redundancies and deleting vacant jobs – on top of 40 jobs already axed last year.
It also hopes to chop £35m off its annual £90m spend on bank and agency staff by improving its recruitment of directly employed staff.
But whether this will be achievable, and where the rest of the savings will come from, remains to be seen.
“Despite our budget increasing by £100m to £1bn, demand for our services continues to grow and our costs have gone up,” Mr Trainer told Newsquest.
“We need to save £61m from our running costs and we’re working on plans to do this.”
He told the board last month that even if the trust delivered the planned savings, it would still end the next financial year with a £50m overspend.
The Department for Health refused to directly comment on BHRUT’s situation, but said it had “inherited a broken NHS” and was “investing an extra £26billion” to “fix it and make it fit for the future”.
“Our reforms are about cutting bureaucracy and red tape, so we can fix the broken system currently holding hard-working staff back and deliver hundreds of millions to the front line,” it said.
It would not explain how forcing the NHS in east London to restrict patients’ access to treatment was achieving this goal.
