North Cumbria’s debt-stricken hospitals have suffered from a year-on-year drop in funding, it has been claimed.

Retired Carlisle consultant Keith Ions is the latest to claim underfunding, not overspending, is to blame for the troubles affecting the Cumberland Infirmary and West Cumberland Hospital.

Speaking at a public meeting in Carlisle, he claimed that funding has not gone up in line with inflation – effectively resulting in a cut of at least £107m over the past four years.

The Success Regime was sent in by the Government to tackle deep-rooted problems across the north Cumbrian NHS, which has a total deficit of about £70m, set to rise to £163m by 2020 if nothing changes.

Meanwhile the Carlisle and Whitehaven hospitals are in special measures, demand for services is growing and there are widespread recruitment problems. Its solution is to close beds, centralise more urgent services in Carlisle and carry out more planned surgery in Whitehaven – meaning patients on both sides of the patch having to travel.

But Mr Ions believes that they have not addressed the root of the proble: the fact that the funding north Cumbria gets is not enough to provide all of the services that north and west Cumbria need.

He flagged up the issue at the Success Regime’s public meeting at the Crown & Mitre in the city centre.

Peter Rooney, chief operating officer at NHS Cumbria Clinical Commissioning Group which decides how local funding is spent, stressed that they agree a contract with the trust every year and pay a certain amount for each procedure carried out.

He added that every year they have invested more money in the hospitals than the previous.

But Mr Ions, a retired orthopedic surgeon who worked at the Cumberland Infirmary for most of his career, fears for the future of the hospital if funding is not increased dramatically. He has drawn up detailed graphs charting North Cumbria University Hospital NHS Trust’s year-on-year income.

And he said if you compare the funding increase against a four per cent rise in inflation, it has effectively taken a cut.

“If you take the old primary care trust spend as a baseline and add four per cent for inflation you find that the actual income of the acute hospitals is £107m behind inflation,” Mr Ions told the panel.

“Would you agree that lack of spending on the acute hospitals is the problem in the trust’s finances?”

He called on them to raise the issue at Government level.

Mr Rooney said they may be able to make that case, but not until they have shown health services in the area are running as efficiently as possible. That means pushing ahead with the plans set out by the Success Regime, including reducing beds at both the infirmary and community hospitals and caring for more people at home.

Mr Ions’ comments come just a week after another retired consultant, Whitehaven’s Mahesh Dhebar claimed the deficit is due to many years of underfunding by central Government.