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.
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It’s time to abolish the body.
They will abolish it and turn it into the ” Vax Health Enforcement” Command Centre – they don’t need nurses as people will be sent home and ‘monitored’ by text.
In fact it has already started.”Virtual Covid Wards” anyone?
“Health Security Agency”
Almost now achieved Sir Humphrey Appleby’s goal of the perfect hospital having no patients, just administrators.
Helps to reduce the queues.
And great for hygiene.
Episode entitled ‘The Compassionate Society’.
Well, as Jim Hacker explained, we need to take on more administrators to reduce the number of administrators.
Need empty hospitals to house Ukraiinian refugees?
Clearly we need more administrators on huge salaries to soak up all the increases in money continuously shovelled at the NHS.
When I was a civil servant there was a use it of loose it mentality. End of year spends where rife. I came back one year to find millions of pounds of kit, almost twice as much as I’d been fighting and arguing for all year.
All the vendors knew about the rich pickings to be had, the better ones would start the charm in December and carry on through April to maximise their spend.
it was disgusting how my colleagues had no clue they where being manipulated from all sides.
worse was that instead of using the money on next years efforts, so much energy was expended on spending as much as possible in a short time so they’d get the same money and more next year.
Everyone from the director to us mere plebs knew this waste was going on yet everyone was incentivised to keep doing it every year.
I can add anecdotally on this Chris…
I was once on a floating project for an independent Devon councillor… I remember him telling me when the local small town beachside toilet block needed to be refurbished to enable disabled access and a mum/babe changing unit, the usual council approved BIG corp contractors all pitched in with quotes around £350k plus and all very similar price spec’d.
So he consulted a local non-approved builder who did a survey and came back with a max price of just £25k all in fixed price. Naturally, said savvy councillor vetoed the project till sense returned.
Tells you all you need to know about how taxes get spent, and this was well over a decade ago.
Same as it ever was….
The whole of the public sector is being utterly rinsed. I’ve just witnessed a project to build a new cycle lane. The street already had extremely wide pavements so all they eventually needed to do was to stick some bollards in and paint a few white lines. Six months it took, with an enormous amount of heavy machinery, that was barely used. Building materials would be delivered, and then the next day they would be collected, then delivered again a few days later, and so on. The workers would be on site for about half a day per week (until the very end where they suddenly worked for a solid 3 days and basically did the entire job). I can guarantee a local counciller got a nice kickback.
It’s not just councillors. Executives and finance directors etc. are also on the take. And central government works in the same criminal way as local government, except on a larger scale.
Who can I vote for if I don’t like this?
Back in my earlier career, I sold large software to the NHS as well as others. Sitting in a committee room going through a proposal, I was asked by the head of the buying team about an optional £85,000 software module. Conversation went like. ‘This module..?’, ‘Yes, you need that’, ‘We need that.?’, ‘Yes’, ‘Well, we’d better have it then’, and we moved on to the next thing they didn’t really need…
Done, dusted, ordered two days later.
I worked for a company once that got desperate and employed a couple of computer report writers, who had always worked for the NHS as contractors. It became obvious almost immediately that they had absolutely zero technical skills. I can’t express strongly enough that they knew absolutely nothing, nada, zilch to do with their job titles. God knows what the NHS had been paying them to do for all those years, because they certainly couldn’t have delivered anything except pure plagiarism. They had to be fired and the NHS gladly took them back.
Choose an independent or small party. They won’t get in but it’s the best way to protest.
It’s the Swamp. I originally thought Trump was exaggerating and a bit of a nut case. As time goes by I think he had it all nailed.
MOH tells a similar story, regarding the upgrading of a nurse-call system in a bike due to be demolished and redeveloped in a couple of years. The main PFI facilities/building contractor came back with a price of £50,000.
MOH (senior hospital engineer) objected, was given the project, and completed it for around £3,000.
The PFI contractor was not happy. Can’t think why.
Indeed. I can vouch for it being the same in the 1970s when I worked in the NHS.
Not just NHS. Most of the civil services is hapless.
NHS bullshit increased by 1000% but nobody seemed to care about that
Thought Tech was going to reduce all of this
The Tech cost £12 billion, and failed to achieve what it was supposed to, i.e. a nationwide electronic patient record.
The various computer systems used weren’t all compatible and wouldn’t speak to one another properly. It bankrupted quite a few vendors.
I worked on that project, the scale of the waste was jaw-dropping. In one section, two hundred (yes hundred) technical architects were paid to define name and address and next of kin data.
I did get a rather swanky convertible Merc out of the contract though!
I was working for a Hospital Trust at the time of this particular NPFIT fiasco, and was severely reprimanded for daring to suggest that instead of employing Anderson Consulting and others on billion pound contracts we should just formulate a set of interoperability standards and let the existing PAS suppliers get on with the job – after all that is pretty much what had happened in Primary Care and the GPs had better systems than many hospitals.
I worked on part of that too, on one midlands site the NOC was too small to fit 2 of the cabinates in, so they stood outside it in the corridor with the power/patch leads running through the doorway. The NOC door had a sign on it “Do Not Close This Door” <sigh>
Now do NHS DIGITAL
No thanks.
Are the 7% additional nurses going to make any productive difference if they’re still organised centrally by the disastrous NHS?
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.
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 opened to private non-profit and for-profit insurers.
CCGs and non-NHS insurers should be free to offer a variety of health plans, including plans with co-payments and deductibles in exchange for rebates.’
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Niemietz-NHS-Interactive.pdf
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.)
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 on, Free Speech Union, how about it?
One possible answer is “Well in the first person I use ‘I’, and in the second person I prefer ‘you’.” [*] Cue hilarity if the idiot asking the question then types “I/you” in their box.
Note
*) In certain circumstances, if the idiot then looks unsatisfied and says they meant what “gender” pronouns, say “Are you asking me to drop my pants?” (Best not to try this at a police station.)
“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’.
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…
How about NHS X and the track and trace scheme? How much money was wasted on that? Good luck Gordon.
Where else is the government going to put their brainwashed lackeys – no what we need are more useless overpaid bureaucrats!
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).
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?
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!
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.
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.
How to spend north of £400bn on the pandemic without having built a single new hospital
Stay home, sacrifice for the bureaucracy, sacrifice as an end in itself because we are implementing the morality of death.
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.
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.
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!
Didn’t C Northcote Parkinson have something to say about this? It looks like classic Parkinson’s Law in action.
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.
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 a bonus for discovering the problem.
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.
So when Johnson has completed his non existent cull of the civil service he can begin a non existent downsizing of NHS bureaucrats.
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.
‘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.
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.
The ‘NHS confederation’ and ‘NHS providers’ appear to duplicate each other. Both appear to be a bunch of superannuated clerks
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.
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.
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.
So much for ‘saving the NHS’, more a case of the NHS saving itself, and damn the patients.