The amount of money spent on management consultants by the NHS is due to be published next summer after the Department of Health bowed to pressure from MPs to release the figures.
The decision comes after the Commons health committee published a report in June which said that management consultants were charging the NHS up to £1,000 a day for advice without the service knowing whether it was getting value for money. It said more than £300m was spent on external advisers in 2008.
A National Audit Office report in 2005-06 concluded that around £600m had been spent on consultant fees and attributed a third of the increase in public sector expenditure on consultancy between 2003-06 to the NHS.
The NHS's chief executive, David Nicholson, had originally said the DoH did not want to "micromanage what the NHS does" and didn't keep central records on its use of consultants. But the department now said it would provide figures from the current financial year and would subsequently provide a breakdown of how the money is spent. The DoH said it would also provide figures for its own spending.
The Commons health committee broke with tradition to publish scrutiny sessions held with the NHS's chief executive, David Nicholson, in 2008, saying it had made "an exception to our normal practice" to comment on his replies about the use of external consultants.
Previous criticism made of the NHS's use of consultants included comments by Dr Jonathan Fielden, chairman of the BMA's consultant's committee, who told colleagues: "Ditch the external management consultants – when we see them flogging our ideas, there is palpable frustration that we are not utilising the great talents across the NHS."
But Nicholson defended the health service's use of consultants in response to questions put to him by the committee and said specialists were needed to consult on key areas such as IT (part of the Connecting for Health programme), the Commercial Directorate and turnaround teams. "There simply were not the people out there for us to recruit, so it was not an issue that we could get a lot of people to do these really very complicated technical things, so we had to use consultancy significantly," he told the committee.
"In terms of the turnaround we spent in excess of £50 million on the turnaround, and I have to say that turnaround moved us from half a billion deficit to one and a half billion surplus."
In 2007-08 the NHS produced a summary of the amounts paid to consultants - previously costs were recorded as "miscellaneous expenditure" - which revealed £43.4m spent by SHAs, £132.6m by PCTs and £132.4m by NHS trusts but there was no breakdown of spending by foundation trusts.
The committee has called for these figures to be provided annually.
