Departmental Expenditure Limits: Department of Health

Mr. Lansley
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer on what date he increased the Department of Health's planned resource departmental expenditure limit for 2005-06 from £75,090 million, as stated in public expenditure statistical analyses 2005, to £76,365 million, as stated in the Treasury's Public Expenditure Outturn White Paper for 2005-06; and how this increase was divided between near-cash and non-cash.

Mr. Timms
Planned expenditure figures changed for a number of routine and technical reasons and because of the reprofiling of the Department of Health's budget. The main reason for the change in planned resource DEL expenditure in 2005-06, which increased the near-cash element of resource DEL, was a classification adjustment to the Department of Health's resource DEL to cover payments to NHS Trusts to meet their depreciation costs, as set out in Budget 2006. Chapter 2 of the public expenditure analyses 2006 compares the latest plans for DEL and AME with the plans set out in the previous year.