THE unaudited deficits for the NHS for 2005- 2006 were announced last week. To my amazement, after a half-year estimate for a year-end deficit of £620 million, the deficit was £512 million.

To me that this was less than expected was unbelievable knowing the difficulties many Trusts have had not being allowed to use brokerage, delayed payment of bills, or other methods smacking of creative accounting for the first time.

It appears that the Government themselves have done the brokerage for this year by borrowing £765 million from somewhere to reduce the deficit from £1.27 billion to the announced level.

I am attempting to find out what budget has been raided to lessen this deficit. I put down a "named day" parliamentary question and the answer I received was: "I shall reply to the Hon. Member as soon as possible." How ridiculous! They must know where the money has come from but, perhaps, not how to wrap it up to the least detriment.

During the last five years, several people have written to me about under-funded occupational pension schemes that have been wound up leaving them far short of their expected pension.

I have just had a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions about the Financial Assistance Scheme and there is to be some extension of this scheme and people who meet other qualifying conditions and were within 15 years of their scheme's pension age on May 14, 2004 may be eligible for tapered proportions of their expected core pension depending on their age.

The letter is detailed and anyone who feels they might be affected please write to me at the House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA for a copy of it.

The merger of the county's three Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) has been rubber-stamped as expected.

We are immediately going to lose key figures. One of these is Eamonn Kelly, who has been our effective and helpful acting chief executive for 18 months.

The only consolation is that, as he is being promoted to a senior position in the Strategic Health Authority, we can expect to have an ally at this level.

With the merger of PCTs, we fear we will lose the local focus of our own PCT, namely the local Patient and Public Involvement Forum and Professional Executive Committee.

For what it is worth, the Government has promised that the local focus will remain but not how this will be achieved.

At least the merger will remove the anachronism that our Primary Care Centre and our out-of-hours GP service are organised by two different trusts.

Non-executive directors for the new countywide PCT are about to be appointed and I have reminded the NHS Appointments Commission about the importance of locally based non-executives on NHS boards since we lost ours on the Acute Trust Board.