“This is a matter of the utmost seriousness and I have had no option but to alert the Information Commissioner. Not only did Suffolk Primary Care Trust omit details of the £437,000 from the response to my original request, they are now telling bare faced lies about their decision to voluntarily release the information”

Ben Gummer, the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Ipswich, has today reported Suffolk Primary Care Trust to the Information Commissioner over their handling of a request for information relating to the Trust’s spend on outside consultants.

In October 2008 a request was submitted on behalf of Ben to establish the Trust’s spend on outside consultants. The exact wording of this request was as follows:

Which outside consultants have been used by Suffolk PCT in each of the last three financial years and how much was spent with each consultant in each year?

On 18 November a response was received which purported that the Trust’s spend on outside consultants, to date, in the 2008/09 financial year was £193,788.19.

Ben subsequently received inside information that the full picture had not been revealed. Therefore, on 27 December a follow-up request was submitted on Ben’s behalf. The exact wording of this request was as follows:

Has Suffolk Primary Care Trust (or subsequently NHS Suffolk) ever engaged McKinsey & Company (www. mckinsey.com) to conduct work for the Trust and, if so, what was the nature and cost of this work broken down by financial year (including the current 08/09 financial year)?

On 26 January a response to this request was received which revealed that £437,000 paid to consultants McKinsey had been omitted from the original response.

Despite this information being requested by Ben (and the full 20 day response period elapsing) Martin Royal, Suffolk PCT’s Director of Business Development, claimed today in a letter to the East Anglian Daily Times:

“Since there is a clear difference in detail between the information initially sent out, we felt it appropriate to send out a supplementary FoI response to replace the first request in order to rectify this matter. We have attached this in the interests of transparency.”

Ben said:

“This is a matter of the utmost seriousness and I have had no option but to alert the Information Commissioner. Not only did Suffolk Primary Care Trust omit details of the £437,000 from the response to my original request, they are now telling bare faced lies about their decision to voluntarily release the information.

“My original request was submitted on 6 October 2008 and a full response was received on 18 November 2008. Understanding the information I received to be incomplete, I ensured a follow-up request was submitted on 27 December 2008 to establish the true nature of Suffolk Primary Care Trust’s frivolous spending on outside consultants.

“Martin Royal, the PCT’s Director of Business Development, is now claiming it was their decision to release this information after realising they ‘wanted to give a fuller response’. Why then did I need to request this information and why did the PCT wait the full 20 working days to provide it? His claims are fundamentally untrue and I would like for a full and public apology from Mr Royal, not only to myself but to the people of Suffolk for his deliberate attempts to deceive them. If this is not forthcoming I will be contacting the Chief Executive of the Primary Care Trust, Carole Taylor-Brown, demanding his resignation.

“£437,000 may be small change to the bureaucrats who sit on the PCT’s board but it is not small change to the hard working NHS professionals at Ipswich Hospital, who have just worked through an incredibly busy Christmas period under ever tightening budgets, and it is certainly not small change to the people of Ipswich and Suffolk who have lost their first rate head & neck cancer surgery team due to this PCT’s cutbacks.

“This additional £437,000, which the PCT tried to hide from the public, could have paid for over 9,000 breast cancer mammograms or nearly 2,000 initial paediatric surgery consultations. It is, despite the PCT’s protests to the contrary, a colossal sum of money.

“I look forward to the Information Commissioner’s independent analysis of the PCT’s conduct. I have no doubt that this deception was orchestrated at the highest level within the Trust due to their embarrassment at their own spending.”
 

11th April 2009