Delivering the Forward View
NHS Planning Guidance 2016/17-2020/21
1. The Spending Review provided the NHS in England with a credible basis on which to
accomplish three interdependent and essential tasks: first, to implement the Five Year
Forward View; second, to restore and maintain financial balance; and third, to deliver
core access and quality standards for patients.
2. It included an £8.4 billion real terms increase by 2020/21, front-loaded. With these
resources, we now need to close the health and wellbeing gap, the care and quality gap,
and the finance and efficiency gap.
3. In this document, authored by the six national NHS bodies, we set out a clear list of
national priorities for 2016/17 and longer-term challenges for local systems, together
with financial assumptions and business rules. We reflect the settlement reached with
the Government through its new Mandate to NHS England (annex 2). For the first time,
the Mandate is not solely for the commissioning system, but sets objectives for the NHS
as a whole.
4. We are requiring the NHS to produce two separate but connected plans:
• a five year Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP), place-based and driving the
Five Year Forward View; and
• a one year Operational Plan for 2016/17, organisation-based but consistent with the
emerging STP.
5. The scale of what we need to do in future depends on how well we end the current
year. The 2016/17 financial challenge for each trust will be contingent upon its end-ofyear
financial outturn, and the winter period calls for a relentless focus on maintaining
standards in emergency care. It is also the case that local NHS systems will only become
sustainable if they accelerate their work on prevention and care redesign. We don’t
have the luxury of waiting until perfect plans are completed. So we ask local systems,
early in the New Year, to go faster on transformation in a few priority areas, as a way of
building momentum.
