Suspended sentences for mental health pair who defrauded NHS

A top mental health GP and a senior clinical commissioning manager who defrauded £153,600 of NHS cash set aside to treat winter patients have avoided being immediately jailed.

Dr Ian Walton and Lisa Hill admitted raising a false invoice for GP training from a charity, on whose board they both sat, before diverting the cash into the bank account of a private company they controlled.

Walton, a highly-regarded GP of more than 30 years, and Hill abused what a judge called their “considerable positions of trust” by having money to which they were never entitled.

Hill, 51, and Walton, 59, did use the money to train up more than 60 GPs.

Judge Paul Farrer accepted the pair were never motivated by avarice, but had instead used the lion’s share of the cash to directly benefit mental health services.

However, he said their decision to simply circumvent NHS financial controls “was both arrogant and dishonest”, he told them.

The judge said it was partly for that reason that he suspended a two-year jail term handed down to both Hill, of Hagley near Stourbridge in the West Midlands, and Walton, for two years.

Sentencing the pair at Birmingham Crown Court on Tuesday, the judge said: “You are both professional, caring and compassionate individuals who for many years have dedicated yourselves to improving mental health services.”

He added: “You have worked tirelessly for the public good for many years and driven improvement in mental health services.”

However, in a “misguided desire to improve” those services, the judge said, they had decided to defraud the NHS by invoicing Sandwell & West Birmingham clinical commissioning group (CCG).

Mr Farrer said: “You allowed your passion for mental health services to override both your judgment and honesty.”

He said such actions could not help but “erode public confidence” in the NHS.

The NHS paid out on the six-figure invoice, despite lacking any formal signed authority or a purchase order, in what the judge called “human error and a lack of proper scrutiny” of financial controls within the organisation, in 2013.

Addressing father-of-four Walton and Hill in the dock, the judge said: “Your actions have now led to the loss of your good names and the ruin of reputations you spent 30 years building.

“You brought those consequences on yourselves but I accept, by itself, it is a significant punishment.”

Walton was a clinical lead on the CCG’s board, but outside the NHS ran a legitimate GP training firm with co-director and mother-of-three Hill, called Walton Hill Associates Ltd.

Both Walton, of Stourbridge Road in Wombourne, near Wolverhampton, and Hill also sat on the board of mental health charity Primhe, which they used to falsely invoice the NHS for the cash.

The money had actually been set aside for the NHS “winter pressures” budget, the court had previously heard.

Both were arrested and then charged at the end of 2015, before pleading guilty to a single count each of fraud in November this year.

_{Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2016, All Rights Reserved.}