THE bill for management consultants in the public sector has risen by 23 per cent in a year, to £3 billion, The Times has learnt.

In the category of which the NHS is a part, fees jumped from £221 million to £998 million in 12 months as debt- ridden health trusts brought in outside advisers to help them to sort out their finances.

A total of 18 hospitals facing the biggest financial problems have been using “turnaround teams” from firms such as KPMG and Deloittes.

Ministers also brought in McKinsey & Co to review the entire NHS structure. The Department of Health received a £1.27 million bill from the company for 2005-06.

KPMG, which has seen its public sector business grow by 20 per cent in the past year, told The Times that NHS trusts could be charged from £100,000 up to “several million pounds” for helping a hospital to tackle its financial problems.

In addition, the Department of Health has asked McKinsey, Deloittes and other big companies to help with preparing the 400 NHS health trusts to apply for foundation status.

Elsewhere, Accenture and other IT consultants are receiving a slice of the £15 billion cost of the beleaguered NHS computer system, Connecting for Health.

Across the public sector, spending on private consultants rose by 23 per cent in 2005 to £3 billion, but this masked a bigger increase in some areas, according to the Management Consultancies Association. The association, which represents 70 per cent of the management consultancy industry, revealed that its members charged the public sector £1.8 billion in 2004, rising to £2.2 billion in 2005.

McKinsey and other companies are not among its members, meaning that the sum will be more than £3 billion.

The bill for consultants in Whitehall dropped by almost half, to £544 million, last year. But spending in local government went up 16 per cent, from £229 million to £266 million, while expenditure by the Ministry of Defence rose from £144 million to £210 million.

Fiona Czerniawska, of the association, said that it was impossible to estimate the exact amount spent by the NHS. The Health Service is included in a category that also covers non-departmental quangos and executive agencies, whose expense have jumped from £221 million to £998 million in the past 12 months.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “We don’t collect figures on how much the NHS spends on consultants, but any figure should be looked at in context. The budget is over £70 billion and the NHS is one of the largest employers in the world.

“However, we are always looking at how the NHS can do things better collectively. For example, targeted support from turnaround teams is helping trusts to address their finances, and this will allow us to build up a bank of expertise within the NHS.

“The result will be that by April 2007 the NHS will once again balance its books, and be equipped to face any financial challenge in the future.”

The Conservatives said that there would be widespread anger that the Government was spending millions on management consultants while hospital wards closed and doctors and nurses lost their jobs.

Andrew Landsley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: “The Government have been reaching for management consultants in a desperate bid to compensate for their management failures.

“Many health professionals in the NHS will be angry that a service that is a billion pounds in deficit is spending hundreds of millions of pounds on consultancy.”

• A programme to give every NHS patient in Britain a complete electronic medical record is running at least 2½ years behind schedule and could triple in cost, Lord Warner, the Health Minister said.

  Rather than the widely quoted figure of £6.2 billion, the project is likely to cost nearer to £20 billion and may not be in place until 2008, he added.

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