Circle’s tough mission for Hinchingbrooke Hospital

Her Majesty’s Comptroller and Auditor General seems to have been nicking ideas from Private Eye. National Audit Office reports these days arrive with a frontispiece of ‘key facts’, reminiscent of the Eye’s ‘number crunching’ feature, plucking a handful of noteworthy numerals from the deluge of auditry that follows, and designed presumably to make the reader go ‘gosh’.

In the NAO’s latest report, on the awarding two years ago of a franchise to run a hospital in Cambridgeshire, one ‘key fact’ leaps out. ‘£0’, it says, ‘is the amount Circle will earn over the ten-year life of the franchise, unless the Trust achieves a surplus under its management’. Yes, that’s right. Unless Circle – the part employee-owned private company that won the franchise – manages to turn the deficit-drained Hinchingbrooke’s finances round and put it into the black, they themselves won’t profit a bean from the deal. The NAO is satisfied that there has been a proper transfer of risk to Circle.