HEALTH BOARD: Swansea Bay £112m in the red and failed by auditors — as payouts for blunders double in a year of scandals

Swansea Bay’s health board has blown its budget by £112m over three years — and is now about to be marked down by auditors for the way it has handled public money.

The figures go before a special board meeting this morning, with auditors due to sign them off tomorrow.

And they don’t make easy reading. The board was meant to balance its books over three years. Instead the gap has got bigger every year.

It overspent by £16.8m, then £42.5m, then a hefty £53.2m last year — £112.4m in total.

Because it missed that target and had no proper plan to fix it, auditors are issuing what’s known as a qualified opinion. In plain terms, it’s a black mark: a formal warning that the money hasn’t been kept within the limits set.

The board was only able to keep paying its staff and suppliers because the Welsh Government stepped in with £74m of emergency cash last year. None of it has to be paid back.

But one figure in the accounts says more than the rest. The amount the board has set aside to cover claims when its care goes wrong has more than doubled in a year — from £18.8m to £40.3m.

The total put by for all negligence and injury claims jumped from £23.7m to £49.8m, though much of that is covered by a shared NHS pot.

That money is the board’s own estimate of what it expects to pay out — and it has shot up in a year when one watchdog after another has laid bare serious failings in its care.

The accounts don’t say which cases drove the bill up. But it lands on top of a run of scandals readers here will know all too well — at a board that runs both Singleton and Morriston hospitals in Swansea, Neath Port Talbot Hospital in Baglan and community sites across Swansea and Neath Port Talbot.

Last summer, an independent review found repeated failings in the board’s maternity care — so serious the Welsh Government was forced to step in and take charge.

It came after families spoke out about the shocking treatment of new mothers at Singleton Hospital, with some saying they would never have another baby after what they went through.

Then there was the knee surgery patient who accused the board of “cooking the books” after his five-year wait was quietly wiped from the records. The Ombudsman called it a “systemic failure” and the board’s chief executive was forced to say sorry.

Even the hospital kitchen made headlines, when a cockroach infestation shut it down for a month.

And in Gorseinon, the board was forced to send its chair and chief executive to face councillors in person and insist it was not closing the town’s hospital, after beds were moved out and metal security plates appeared on the windows.

Today’s accounts pile the money worries on top of all that. Auditors have also raised concerns about the way the board hands out its top interim jobs — the very posts now in charge of sorting out its finances.

Once the board signs them off, the accounts go to the Welsh Government by the end of the month.

For a health board already saying sorry on so many fronts, a failed set of accounts and a soaring payout bill cap off a year it will want to forget.