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Trust Budget and Itemised Breakdown of Spend

Reference: 25-26233

Date response sent: 20/08/2025

Details of enquiry

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, PPE, 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 provide 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 sent

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a single Trust within the NHS, ie it is part of the NHS, as such does not have oversight of all NHS expenditure which was not incurred by our Trust.

For details of Trust expenditure, please kindly refer to the Trust’s on-line publications as follows:

  1. Annual-Report-and-Accounts-2024-25.pdf specifically pages 102 onwards which address:
  2. Comprehensive Income
  3. Financial Position
  4. Operating Expenses
  5. Staff Costs
  6. There may be other areas of interest to you within this report.

 

  1. We also have Publication scheme on the Trust’s website, which conforms to the Information Commissioners requirement for such information to be publicly available in this order.

You may care to peruse the pages 100 onwards where the following information is provided, amongst much more:

  1. Supplier spend exceeding £25,000 a month
  2. Trustwide Contracts Register, as at May 2025
  3. Trustwide Gifts and Hospitality Register 2024-25

 

  1. The Trust has also published a listing of responses to FOI requests which you may wish to peruse, as many requests relate to expenditure. FOI Disclosure Log  – Questions and Answers
  2. With regards to the itemised listing of expenditure requested at the end of your suggested list of items, we do not hold our data in a way that we can provide an itemised listing of every item of expenditure as defined in your bulleted list above. This is because our 3rd party partners who manage our bought ledger system hold our data by supplier invoice, date and amount spent only, with cost centre, in accordance with our requirements.

To provide the “line by line” detail that you require for all transactions would mean manually checking every purchase order raised over last year and previous years, for payments drawn last year and then looking at the detail on the invoice presented for payment against these purchase orders, and noting down the detail of the spend.  We have estimated that this would take approximately 10-20 minutes per purchase order, so at least 166 hours per thousand purchase orders.

Section 12 of FOIA 2000 provides for refusal of requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours/£450, equivalent to 18 hours at a generic £25 per hour of officer time. The per hour figure is set by Regulations rather than actual salary paid to any officers handling requests. The appropriate limit includes the time it would take the Trust to discover if it holds the requested information, locate it, and extract it – which would be in addition to any particular formatting requested by the requester.

As this part of your request is estimated to exceed the appropriate limit under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, the Trust is not obliged to respond to this question, namely to provide a ‘line-by-line or transaction-level data if such records exist, so that every pound spent can be accounted for’, and will therefore not be processing this further.

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