Publish date: 30 October 2025
As we continue to navigate through one of the most financially challenging periods the NHS has faced, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge your collective commitment, support and resilience in ensuring we continue to provide safe high quality care for our service users and patients.
In response to the ongoing financial pressures across the region, NHS Cheshire and Merseyside ICB established a system Financial Control Oversight Group (FCOG) to undertake a review of current non-pay expenditure.
As part of this review, the FCOG has recommended the implementation of more robust controls on discretionary spending to make sure resources are managed responsibly and directed to where they are needed most.
Discretionary spend refers to an expense that is not necessary and can either be reduced, stopped, or postponed by the Trust without undermining patient care.
This includes:
- Advertising for staff recruitment
- Books, journals and subscriptions (non-mandatory)
- Conferences and seminars
- Computer hardware purchases
- Design costs (except essential to progress capital projects)
- External consultancy fees
- External contracts: catering
- Furniture and fittings
- Hospitality
- Mobile phones (except essential staff requirement)
- Office equipment and materials: purchase/hire/repairs
- Non-essential printing
- Professional fees
- Stationery
- Taxi and other vehicle hire (except patient flow/internal transport service)
- Travel costs (except essential staff travel).
Spending in any of these areas that directly impacts on patient care may be allowed but will be subject to appropriate approval from a senior level.
As you will recall, the Trust has previously specified categories that are subjected to additional ‘Technical Approval’ via SBS Oracle, including:
- External meeting rooms
- External catering.
This will now be replaced by a new process where requests for discretionary products or services are submitted via a dedicated online form.
The forms will be monitored by the Procurement Team who will confirm whether they are discretionary, patient related or a product that requires ‘unmasking’ (meaning they cannot be ordered without approval) request, for NHS Supply Chain products and approved accordingly.
Once the request has had budgetary approval, it will be sent for final approval to the relevant divisional director/deputy divisional director.
All forms that have final approval will be allocated a reference number which will need to be included on a requisition, raised within SBS Oracle; requisitions raised for discretionary spend without this reference will be rejected.
NHS Supply Chain and the masking of products
As part of this process, several products currently available via the NHS Supply Chain catalogue will be masked (they cannot be ordered without approval).
Masked products include:
- Items with a unit value of more than £1,000 including VAT (both clinical and non-clinical)
- All discretionary spend categories currently available via the NHS Supply Chain catalogue.
Unmasking requests for products within these two categories must be submitted using the same form; unmasking requests for clinical products with a unit value under £1,000 including VAT may be submitted as per the usual procedure.
This new process will enable the Procurement Team to advise on product suitability and minimise the ordering of incorrect products.
The online form is available via Discretionary Expenditure Submissions
Thank you for your continued support and cooperation, these small changes will make a big difference.
