4.1 The Chief Executive of an NHS Trust sponsoring a scheme is the Accountable Officer for all capital schemes (Figure 8 overleaf). However in the case of the Campus partners there was no clarity over whether there was, or should have been, a single Accountable Officer.
4.2 The Chief Executive of St Mary's NHS Trust believed in late 2003 that, ultimately, he was the single Accountable Officer for the scheme, given that all expenditure was initially made through his Trust's accounts and then recharged to other Campus partners on an agreed basis. Imperial College never accepted that their Rector was an Accountable Officer for this scheme, nor even that he was appropriately a Senior Responsible Owner for what was an NHS-led and driven scheme. The Chief Executive of the NHS confirmed in writing to the Campus partners in February 2004 that the Chief Executives of St Mary's NHS Trust and the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust and the Rector of Imperial College were equally accountable for determining the appropriateness of any expenditure by their own organisations on the Campus scheme.
4.3 The Chief Executive of St Mary's has subsequently come to learn that in April 2004 his external auditors had stated that, since there was more than one participating organisation in the scheme it was not, by definition, possible for there to be one Accountable Officer for the scheme. The Department told us that it considered this to be simply a governance issue of how the Campus partners satisfied themselves as to the propriety of expenditure charged to their organisations, rather than an Accountable Officer issue.