Yet more financial mess at St George's brewing...

Last year St George’s finally seemed to have got its finances in order and made a £1 million profit. Good news given the need to service £36 million of debt. Unfortunately, the improvement required a four month staff vacancy freeze and the selling off staff accommodation for £6 million. Neither actions were sustainable.

In the first five months of this financial year, St George's has already run up a deficit of another £2 million. To break even this year it will have to slash costs to compensate with a profit of nearly £4 million in the back half of the year.

This debacle was caused management’s failure to agree a budget BEFORE the year started. Extraordinarily, they went into the year with a £6 million budget black hole. The taxpayer deserves better than an ‘it will be alright on the night’ approach to public money.

Staff and patients will now likely pay the price of this management budgeting failure as another round of cuts hits the Hospital.

Senior managers must help end this feast and famine in our local NHS by committing themselves to agreeing a budget at the start of the year.

The AGM would be a good time to make this commitment. I suspect that the addition of the experience of former Unilever Finance Director, Graham Hibbert, who has recently joined the Board could be decisive here.