NHS Improvement, the UK health watchdog, has published figures which reveal that about 100 agency staff are earning more than £200,000 a year for covering staff shortages, while more than 500 doctors take home in excess of £150,000 a year. NHS Improvement has called for more transparency in agency worker pay.
NHS doctors have also been banned from earning lucrative agency rates while moonlighting at other hospitals by NHS Improvement after it emerged that five medics were paid more than £2 million a year between them. The ban has been put in place to prevent locum doctors and nurses from setting themselves up as private companies so they can avoid taxes. According to the watchdog, up to 90% of temporary staff were thought to be operating in this manner, which means they only pay corporation tax of about 21%, whereas income tax can be as high as 45%.
NHS Improvement expects to save up to £300 million a year, while they also estimate that the NHS has saved £1 billion a year since new caps on agency fees were introduced in October 2015.
“These new rules will make sure most agency staff get paid and taxed in the same way as their NHS staff colleagues,” Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHS Improvement, said. “We expect these new measures to take another big chunk out of excessive agency costs; there are far too many agency staff making the most out of the lower tax rates.
"We believe that greater transparency is needed around the pay of these staff, and we will work with trusts to agree actions to achieve this; as part of this we may ask providers to publish rates paid to high-earning locums," Mackey said.
Those within the staffing industry, however, feel somewhat aggrieved by the misrepresentation of the cost of agency staff and the scapegoating of agencies for years of poor workforce planning by the government. The overwhelming majority of hospital trusts use frameworks to obtain agency staff, where pay rates are negotiated and agreed by NHS trusts and central government. Nevertheless, extreme, outlier, off-framework instances are often cited as if they are the norm.
