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Health finance - overpayments and cuts

I have two answers from the Secretary of State for Health. One shows they have overpaid for some pharmaceuticals by some hundreds of millions of pounds. The other says they will tell me what the cuts to PCTs are soon.

They have the figures to hand on the PCTs so giving a holding answer (just before the half term recess) shows that they are quite sensitive about this.

East Wakefield suffers cuts of around £10 Million and many other PCTS suffer cuts around the same order of magnitude as Birmingham.

What I have been unable to find out so far is what the aggregate national figure is.

Still if I have found a few hundreds of millions for the NHS from drug overpayments, can we have a bit for Birmingham.

The answer of pharmaceuticals is quite clever because it provides a lot of the information, but not exactly that which is needed to work out the overpayment. They have a real challenge here to work out what they are doing about the previous overpayments which would normally be clawed back.

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