by Steve Sweeney

NHS trust deficits will hit a whopping £850 million this year as the health service funding crisis deepens, official figures revealed yesterday.

The overspend — more than £250m worse than forecast — was uncovered by the Health Service Journal.

Figures supplied by 232 NHS trusts indicated the total deficit is more than three times the amount NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens had pledged by the end of the year.

Additionally NHS trusts have received £1.8 billion in emergency funding this year, which means that the real deficit could total a record £2.65bn.

Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth slammed the figures as “an embarrassment for Jeremy Hunt” and said that it “shows that scale of the financial challenge in the NHS.”

A Health Campaigns Together spokesman said the figures were evidence that “Simon Stevens’s plan is disintegrating.”

He said that “big questions” about the crisis in the NHS are beginning to emerge, warning that the situation is now so serious that “more money is needed or people will die.”

Unison head of health Christina McAnea said: “The government is desperate to convince people there’s enough cash in the NHS, if only everything could be done more efficiently. But the harsh reality is quite different.

“Hospital trusts are going deeper into the red, in many cases hampered by crippling public finance initiative payments.

Meanwhile demands on the NHS keep growing and winter is almost here and, with it, the cold weather that brings a spike in the number of people needing care.

“The Chancellor must find more money for the NHS and social care in this month’s Autumn Statement.”