The Department of Health has scrapped its centrally set deadline for primary care trusts to create provider arm strategies. It comes amid fears of PCTs obsessed by organisational structure making poor decisions.

Commissioners and providers had been told to come up with “organisational options for providing community services” by October, but in a letter to PCT and strategic health authority chief executives last week, NHS chief executive David Nicholson said the timetable would be dropped in favour of an SHA led approach,

Mr Nicholson said the move did not constitute a change in policy and was instead “about keeping PCT decisions safe, while moving faster not slower”.