About

Data methodology and sources

CCGs

Total annual budgets given to Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) cover the majority of NHS funding. CCGs were created following the Health and Social Care Act in 2012, and replaced Primary Care Trusts on 1 April 2013. They are clinically-led statutory NHS bodies responsible for the planning and commissioning of health care services for their local area. As of 1 April 2019 there are 191 CCGs in England.

It is not possible to directly compare 2023/24 CCG budgets to 2015/16 CCG budgets, as a number of CCG boundaries have changed and merged during the period since 2015/16.

To estimate cuts to a CCG area, we therefore had to begin by merging the 2015/16 CCG data to match the current set of CCGs. We used the following data sources to do this:

• CCG Revised Allocations 2015/16
• CCG Mergers

We then found the 2023/24 allocation for each of these CCGs, using:

• CCG Allocations 2023/24

To estimate the reduction in NHS funding compared to historical levels, we projected each CCG's 2015 budget to 2023. This was done using NHS specific inflation rates and historical rates of NHS funding growth.

• NHS Economic assumptions 2016/17 to 2020/21
• Historical Rates of NHS Funding Growth

We used the per-person value of historical growth, and combined this with the population growth of each CCG, to get a better weighted distribution of expected CCG funding.

In summary, our calculation looks like:

  Expected 2023 Budget = Actual 2015 Budget × (Inflation at 2.4%)8
    × CCG Population Growth × (Historic Funding Growth at
    3.3%)8
  

GP Surgeries

We used the same methodology as above, but with 2015/16 and 2018/19 data. Unfortunately, because of data matching issues, not all GPs are in our dataset.

• NHS Payments to General Practice, England, 2015/16
• NHS Payments to General Practice, England, 2018/19