Tory MP demands to know how government will recoup £10m in NHS “pay-offs”

The chairman of the parliamentary health select committee is to write to England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to ask him to explain how senior NHS managers were awarded six figure redundancy payments during the government’s reorganisation of the NHS, only to be re-employed in the health service soon after.

The intervention from the Conservative Stephen Dorrell came after the Times published a list of 36 senior NHS bosses who received a total of more than £10m (€12.2m; $16.5m) in redundancy payments, including one manager paid £370 000 despite never leaving the health service at all.1

A total of 161 health bodies were abolished in April 2013 as part of the Health and Social Care Act, leading to many redundancies. However, many of the people who lost their jobs were later re-employed, costing the NHS millions.2

The law only requires NHS staff to wait four weeks after redundancy before taking up a new job within the health service, but David Nicholson, chief executive of NHS England, has urged managers to wait at least six months before seeking re-employment within the NHS.

The government has since moved to change the law. Hunt assured the Health Committee in December that new mechanisms would be in place to ensure that, in the future, staff who received pay-offs would not be re-employed within a year unless they paid them back, but he said this could not be applied retrospectively3

But in light of the latest disclosures, Dorrell said that he would be writing to Hunt to ask for reassurance that the issue was being dealt with.

Quoted in the Times Dorrell said, “Ministers and Sir David Nicholson assured the committee that provisions would be in place to ensure that payments would not be made to staff who were re-employed within a short period of leaving their posts. I intend to write to the Secretary of State to ask him what steps he has taken to ensure that policy has been carried out.

“It’s all very well talking about the future but we want to know what steps have been taken to ensure that people were not reemployed after taking redundancy.”4

A spokesman for the health department said, “The current rules on redundancy were put into contracts in 2006 and need reform—the costs which come with that are frustrating.

“We are working on tough new plans to cap redundancy payouts for senior managers and claw back all or part of the payment if they return to work for the NHS within a year of being made redundant. These one-off redundancy costs should be measured against the fact that we are freeing up £5.5bn efficiency savings this parliament. There are now over 12 200 more clinical staff in the NHS since May 2010, while the number of admin staff, managers, and senior managers has fallen by over 21 400. Patients want to see more frontline staff and less bureaucracy—that is what we will continue to deliver.”

• Download figure
• Open in new tab
• Download powerpoint

Stephen Dorrell, chairman of the parliamentary Health Committee

PA Wire