Health leaders have warned that continued delays and a lack of clarity on how to access crucial investment risks their ability to redesign services and adapt and change their facilities to see and treat more patients.

In a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, leaders have called for clear guidance from NHS England and Improvement, backed by the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care, on how to secure the funding they now urgently need to continue bringing down the number of patients waiting for treatment, which now stands at 5.1 million.

NHS Confederation warns that the current process of applying for money for capital upgrades is onerous and often opaque. Hospital trust leaders say that they are either not able to access this much needed investment at all, or that, if they are, it takes too long to receive, with too many bureaucratic hurdles to overcome. Yet this funding is key to making the urgently needed changes to redesign NHS wards and theatres and ramp up elective care capacity and treat more patients.  

The letter also calls on the Chancellor and government to provide financial certainty for the second half of the financial year, with the NHS currently being expected to plan care and treatment for patients, and recruit staff, without knowing how much they will have to spend to do so beyond September.

Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “Given extra investment and much easier access to capital funding the health service can continue to get more patients back through its doors and really start to ramp up how many people it sees and treats.

“But crucially to be able to do this effectively the bureaucratic barriers preventing healthcare leaders from quickly securing existing funding must be removed. Healthcare leaders also desperately require clarity on how much money they will have to spend after the summer, without it they are being placed in a truly impossible position.”