NHS: Finance
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of the level of volatility in the prices of petrol and diesel on the budgets of hospital trusts and ambulance trusts.
Answered by Karin Smyth
We will be carefully monitoring the impact of the current volatility in fuel prices on the National Health Service, with a view to managing it as part of usual in-year financial management of risk. The impact on fuel prices will be felt by all organisations who rely on fuel for transport, including the indirect potential impact on the cost of deliveries, and direct costs on the NHS fleet which consists of over 20,000 vehicles travelling over 460 million miles every year. The impact is likely to vary, for example as part of the NHS Net Zero travel and transport strategy, a number of ambulance trusts are trialling zero-emission response vehicles.
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