NHS bureaucracy has doubled since the start of the pandemic despite little change in the size of the frontline workforce, with nurses increasing just 7%, a new report reveals. The Telegraph has more.
The figures come as a record 6.4 million people – one in nine of the population – are on waiting lists, with record trolley waits in Accident & Emergency departments.
And it follows concern that an extra £12 billion a year funding boost, funded by a 1.25% National Insurance hike, which came in last month, will be swallowed on management salaries, instead of clearing the backlogs.
The new analysis shows that the number of officials working in the Department of Health and NHS England has more than doubled in two years, with even sharper rises seen at the most senior levels. Meanwhile the number of nurses rose by just 7%, thinktank the Policy Exchange found. Its experts said the trends showed an “astonishing” explosion in central bureaucracy, calling for an urgent review and action to slim down and streamline its workings.
The findings come ahead of a review of leadership in the NHS by a former army general. Sir Gordon Messenger has been sent in by Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, amid concern over the quality of management in the NHS as the service faces the biggest backlogs in its history. The general has been asked to stamp out “waste and wokery” in the health service and ensure “every pound is well spent”.
The analysis shows that the total pay bill at the Government department and central body in charge of the NHS has doubled in the two years since February 2020, from £42 million to £83 million.
The workforce of the bodies rose from 7,883 to 14,515 over the period, with the number of senior officials rising by 125%.
Even these figures exclude health agencies – such as the U.K. Health Security Agency – and its predecessor Public Health England, which expanded during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the nursing workforce rose by just 7% – from 298,632 to 319,808, despite desperate shortages of frontline staff.
It comes as Boris Johnson orders a Civil Service cull, with 91,000 jobs due to go in order to cut costs by £3.5 billion…
The report shows some of the steepest rises in bureaucracy come at the top of the health bodies. The figures show a 130% increase in senior roles at NHS England in just two years, while the senior headcount at the Department of Health doubled.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
So much for ‘saving the NHS’, more a case of the NHS saving itself, and damn the patients.
Such Irony. The Secretary for Health complains at NHS bureaucracy but then sends in yet another bureaucrat on another salary to sort out the mess he should be taking responsibility for. Talk about a Government out of control.!! The NHS needs disbanding and handing back to grass roots. As does Education. In fact the Westminster cartel needs disbanding and handing back to the populace.
NHS senior management are generally useless and couldn’t get a similar, high paid job in the commercial sector. Along with most Snivel Serpents.
A friend is the local top consultant psychiatrist. He and his number 2 were called to a meeting at the Trust HQ. They were asked could they provide an improved service for less money by a room full of various ‘Directors’, all of whom were on 6 figure salaries. The simple answer was no but a whole day was wasted while all the ‘Directors’ spouted BS.
CCG ‘Directors’ are also on 6 figures but nobody in Primary Care knows what they do for that money.
All that hype from jellied eel Johnson about “our NHS” ( saving it?) and saying how much money needs to be extracted from people…. to do nothing more than expand an already bloated bureaucracy. Our money is going to fund these bureucrats’ pensions, not pay for more front line nursing staff. No wonder patients go hungry on wards if unable to feed
themselves because there aren’t enough nurses/health care to help them.
The ‘NHS confederation’ and ‘NHS providers’ appear to duplicate each other. Both appear to be a bunch of superannuated clerks
The NHS was already top-heavy with B-ark types long before the so-called pandemic, as far back as the turn of the century, if not earlier. Its fitness for purpose was questionable back then. Its time for it to go.
‘NHS bureaucracy has doubled since the start of the pandemic despite little change in the size of the frontline workforce, with nurses increasing just 7%’
7% additional nurses!
Are there any nursing staff left in the Congo.
Of course the NHS bureaucracy is above reproach. You only have to listen to Bojos soundbites to realise that. The forthcoming cuts to the civil service are more interesting. Last time (2011-16) it was frontline services that bore the brunt of it. Now there are only policy people left to cull. Past experience shows that the poor are expendable. What do you think the ratio of job losses will be among junior staff compared with Senior Management? Too many chiefs….soon that is all we shall be left with, but at least another box will be ticked.
So when Johnson has completed his non existent cull of the civil service he can begin a non existent downsizing of NHS bureaucrats.
An American Company and a Japanese Company decided to engage in a boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance levels. On the big day they felt ready. The Japanese won by a mile. The American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.
The consultant’s finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the American team had one person rowing and eight people steering.
After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the consultant firm concluded that too many people were steering and not enough were rowing on the American team.
So as race day neared again the following year, the American team’s management structure was completely reorganized.
The new structure: four steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide a work incentive.
The next year, the Japanese won by TWO miles!!! Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers… Read more »
This reminds me of the space race in the 60’s. the Americans spent god only knows how much to develop a pen that would work in zero gravity.
The russians used a pencil.
i like the chart above saying “optimistic and pessimistic scenario” basically this is how we are going to lie and this the reality and yet its worse than that.
Didn’t C Northcote Parkinson have something to say about this? It looks like classic Parkinson’s Law in action.
One way to stamp out “waste and wokery” in the health service might be not to have a tit like Javid in charge of it. If he argued the toss with the administrators rather than medical professionals, that might have some merit, but let’s not hold our collective breath.
“tit” you mean the WEF don’t select their alumni on merit?
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!
Soon there’ll be nothing but bureaucracy. The NHS is now my last port of call when I have a problem. 1. Natural Remedies, 2. Private & 3. NHS when all else fails.
Fewer frontline staff, more bureaucrats.
What a surprise.
Which group decides how to allocate the money they’ve robbed us of?
No prizes for guessing.
Stay home, sacrifice for the bureaucracy, sacrifice as an end in itself because we are implementing the morality of death.
How to spend north of £400bn on the pandemic without having built a single new hospital
This proves the old adage that you don’t cure a problem by throwing money at it. The NHS is dysfunctional: it needs substantial reform before giving it more money to waste.
Correct. The structure is the problem (thanks Tony); what is clear is that hurling huge sums of money at the NHS NEVER makes ANY difference.
It’s what I call a “bloatocracy”, and in its current form will never be anything else. The purpose of the NHS bureaucracy is to look after its own interests, not those who fund it. Happens with all large bureaucracies.
The insurance based systems used in many European countries, with full safety nets, have far better outcomes than the NHS – however, the NHS is now a sacred cow so any talk of reform is howled down.
These stats seem suspect to me, I’d want to verify them before reading too much into them.
My view is you don’t get that sort of delta without someone including some restructuring that skews the figures. Maybe I’m wrong though.
Au contraire. Johnson has massively increased the public sector. He’s no Conservative, rather a Conslcialist. With no conscience.
No surprise – the future of the NHS does not lie in ‘Health Care’ and Nursing as we have known them but in draconian control over people’s bodies and their lives fronted by the Gates WHO. GPs will soon be abolished as algorithms diagnose by iphone and prescribe the ‘appropriate’ Pharma big budget product for those deserving only of course – dissenter left to rot!)
Amazing how the incredulous people watch, transfixed as billionaire psychopaths plot how to destroy our lives!
Schwab meant what he said about a ‘Revolution’ and owning nothing while being drugged monitored, controlled into stupefied ‘happiness by his ‘Great Reset’ !
It is long past the time people really need to understood that .
Soon all criticism of their dystopian nightmare project, four fifths of our Globalist lackey MPs and Establishment have signed us up to without so much as a murmur will be censored.
The coming ‘damp squib’ ‘battle’ over the Gates/WHO ‘power grab’ over our bodies and the trashing of our National Sovereignty – the very core of Brexit – might be the” last ditch “.
Johnson is such a phoney! We have been so conned!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5zEb1oS9A
^
“It’s up for the Florence Nightingale Award.”
It’s possible that naming the emergency field hospitals “Nightingale” units was a deliberate reference to this scene in “Yes Minister”.
Gotta give the middle-to-upper bureaucrats something that puts a spring in their step, keeps their morale up, makes them feel they’re with the programme, over and above the licence to walk around telling other people what to do, “because” this, that, and the other.
Certainly public relations is NOT just aimed at punters – it’s also aimed at those who work inside the organisation, including management.
It’s possible, I suppose, though it’s more likely that they were named after Nightingale Wards, which are single large rooms containing a lot of patients, without bays, or dividers. which was the model they used, I think?
Off topic, but I’d just like to say that in over 2 years I have personally known of 12 people who have died and non of them were due to or of covid. All have been elderly, except for 1 who was 64 and over 30 stone. I was also in an organisation with a very high percentage of elderly people (a 1/3 of the club are in their 80’s) not 1 has died but they are all hysterical (that’s why I left).
Where else is the government going to put their brainwashed lackeys – no what we need are more useless overpaid bureaucrats!
How about NHS X and the track and trace scheme? How much money was wasted on that? Good luck Gordon.
My daughter helped out a friend by getting her a job in the private office she works in as her friend was in the NHS and refused the jab. She ‘worked’ in admin and has been promoted twice in three years, basically she’s a nightmare, takes days off at the drop of a hat because the kids are ill, the dog’s died (she had three days off with that one, even though she had it put down because it had become too much effort to look after), she complains constantly that the workload is too heavy, despite the fact she’s only covering 50% of what she should be and my daughter is doing 150%.
The NHS has 15-20% of good workers the rest are shysters and they could cut the workforce by at least 25% by keeping the ‘workers’ and telling the others ‘step up or leave’.
Stop whining, Catee 😉 (ref your earlier comment)
No, of course, you’re 100% correct.
An acquaintance who recently took a sort of Project Manager position at NHS Digital (and wouldn’t know a well-designed and well-built piece of software if it hit him in the face) is still telling himself that NHS Digital is full of people “at the top of their game”.
Obviously, he still wears a mask everywhere and scans the blooming QR codes with his wonderful App.
Full of people with their greedy snouts in the trough more like
‘At the top of their game’.
Since they’re ‘gaming’ the NHS (and the taxpayer) that seems about right.
It’s been estimated that around 10% of any workforce do most of the work, and are responsible for most of the productivity.
Some of the rest are outright shysters, but the rest simply aren’t good enough. They think they are, but they’re not, and are not smart enough to recognise that.
They’re smart enough, at least, to recognise that they’re unlikely to be good enough anywhere else either, So, they keep their heads down and hope to eke things out until retirement…
How come this super smart and efficient 10% are able to deal with the super lazy incompetent 90%.
Netflix may have started the ball rolling on that one…
https://www.hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/diversity-news/nhs-wasting-money-employing-equality-and-diversity-staff/51309
I don’t mind waiting for life saving sugery, as long as they get their pronouns correct! /s
Why do people say “pronouns” rather than “pronoun”? The first word always implies the second, given that something like “he/her” doesn’t seem to be allowed.
If women have two (“she/her”), then men should have three (“he/him/his”), or is it a strict rule these days that “his” is a determiner and must not be referred to as a possessive pronoun?
Or of course the argument can be turned around: if men should have three, then women should also have three, but the second and third will be the same “she/her/her”.
This goes directly to the difference between form and function – two words can have the same form but different function – but hey, let’s not imagine there is an education system.
Then there is the question of what to do about the predicative determiners “his” and “hers”. That would at least equalise the respective numbers (“he/him/his/his” and “she/her/her/hers”).
And given the famous “role of the reader”, why shouldn’t my pronouns depend on who is using them? For example I could be “he” most of the time, but “it” if the speaker is a public official.
There should be a competition for the best answer to “What are your pronouns?” Come… Read more »
“There should be a competition for the best answer to “What are your pronouns?””
I’m more surprised that we’ve accepted the framing.
Pronouns are how I see others in the world and are for me to choose based upon my perception.
A third party has no more right to dictate how I choose to describe the world I see than they have of choosing my hair colour or beard length.
If it appears feminine it’s a she. Hence boats are she and knives are he.
I’ve seen many boats that didn’t deserve a ‘she’ (many not even an ‘it’).
Is the knives bit because of ‘Jack the Knife’?
Mack?
If memory serves, Joan Armatrading got there decades ago with her album ‘I, Me, Mine’.
Sir Gordon Messenger will do a cracking job, provided he is given the necessary support from the Minister.
But, however good the job that he does, it is just a sticking plaster.
Root and branch reform is required.
We know what to do:
‘The Dutch system shows that a successful health system needs no state-owned hospitals, no state hospital planning and no hospital subsidies.
The Swiss system shows that even substantial levels of out-of-pocket patient charges need not be regressive, and that people can be trusted to choose sensibly from a variety of health insurance plans.
The ‘PKV pillar’ of the German system shows that a healthcare system can be fully prefunded, just like a pension system.
The quasi-market reforms of the 2000s can be built upon, to move gradually from the status quo to a pluralistic, consumer-oriented healthcare system.
Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are, in a sense, comparable to insurers, so giving people free choice of CCG would be a necessary (albeit not sufficient) first step towards creating a quasi-SHI system. CCGs’ budgets would then have to correspond closely to the risk profile of the patient population they cover, and this market should also be… Read more »
I’d rather keep banknotes under my mattress and pay a surgeon when I need one. Which is the same way I treat house “insurance”. The only insurance policy I’ve got is for the car, and the only reason is because in practice it’s a legal requirement. (Technically it isn’t: one can post a bond, but that would be far too much rigmarole, and quite possibly it would also be more expensive because it’s not something the ruling criminals want to encourage.)
How am I not surprised. One can only hope that Sir Gordon achieves something however whatever he recommends will be quickly undermined by vested interests. The NHS and associated organisations will continue to eat up all that is available and ask for more.
It’s always the same pattern.
1 They rob and steal and cheat and lie.
2 Then they set up an enquiry under Lord this or Sir that.
3 That gives the chatterers something to talk about – first the terms of reference, then all the guff that happens at the soap opera of an enquiry.
4 Goto 1.
To echo the Yes Minister theme started earlier in the comments, according to Sir Humphrey, enquiries are never set up unless they know in advance what its findings will be.
Are the 7% additional nurses going to make any productive difference if they’re still organised centrally by the disastrous NHS?
Now do NHS DIGITAL
No thanks.