Exclusive: £1.5m bill for team flown in to run ailing NHS trust

Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust has struck a new deal with the American-led team from Bolt Partners to bring in three more executives which will see monthly payments for the consultants reach as much as £250,000.

The turnaround specialists were drafted in earlier this year after the trust ran into major financial difficulties and in the new deal have been tasked with drawing up a strategic vision for its future.

The trust’s problems triggered four departures of board executives, leading to exit deals which new figures reveal cost more than £500,000. The Yorkshire Post for the first time today reveals details of two key investigations into what went wrong, although the trust is refusing to reveal the full extent of the raft of failings uncovered.

Payments to departing executives show Matthew Lowry, the former hospital chief who had a spell as acting chief executive before being replaced by Bolt’s Michael Morgan early this year, was handed between £260,000 and £265,000 in redundancy and pay in lieu of notice.

Jacqui Bate, the former head of personnel, was given between £110,000 and £115,000 after holding the post, which paid between £120,000 and £125,000, for just over a year.

Former chief executive Brian James received between £220,000 and £225,000 during the last financial year to the end of March following his resignation from the £170,000-a-year post in November.

It can also be revealed that the trust’s interim chairman, Christopher Langley, who was appointed in June, is being paid £12,000 a month under a contract which requires him to work one or two days a week. The level of payment is up to three times that given to his predecessor.

The bill for Bolt’s services last night prompted renewed questions about the scale of payments to private consultants in the NHS.

The new Bolt deal, which was rubber-stamped at a behind-closed-doors board meeting last month, will take the total bill to taxpayers to around £1.5m including VAT, as well as expenses for the team of consultants who are paid at a fixed rate, meaning they do not have to produce receipts. Taxpayers had already forked out nearly £650,000 between January and August.

Sue Cookman, regional organiser for Unison which is running a campaign calling for key hospital services to be retained in Rotherham, said there needed to be clearer accountability over the decision taken to employ and extend the contract for Bolt’s team.

“All this money has been spent on Bolt Partners and you would expect to see something for that but I don’t believe we are,” she said.

“For £1.5m I would expect to see a better return on public money.”

Local MPs John Healey, Sarah Champion and Kevin Barron had a pre-scheduled meeting with trust bosses earlier this week following which Mr Healey said: “As local MPs we have raised questions about the extension of the contract and the increase in payments to consultants during this period and raised questions about the extent to which the details of all these payments have been fully disclosed.

“We have directly raised these concerns and are continuing to press for answers.”

The Yorkshire Post asked the trust how the level of public spending on private consultants and the interim chairman was justified but despite being given several days to respond a spokeswoman said they would not be able to provide a comment until next week.

A spokesman did say the pay-offs were redundancy pay and payments in lieu of notice except for Mr James who had his contract, which was due to run to May 2013, paid up.

The trust is also refusing to release full details of the two reports into failings at the trust following freedom of information requests from the Yorkshire Post.

Some details of both reports have been released but they have been heavily censored by trust bosses and sources have indicated that their circulation even within the organisation is being tightly controlled.

One covers a damning investigation into the introduction of a key electronic patient record system, which has gone heavily over-budget.

It found private contractors were given authority to approve expenditure on the multi-million pound project, concluding that in a number of areas there was a breakdown in the trust’s “governance arrangements, culture, stakeholder engagement, project management, processes and controls”.

A second report into how the trust was run makes 48 recommendations for improvements including “re-building an effective board” and “clarifying responsibilities” at all levels in the organisation.

Today’s revelations follow a July exposé in the Yorkshire Post which detailed the raft of lucrative payments going to consultants brought in to help run the hospital.

They included an HR consultant, Yasmin Rafiq, who has been receiving £600 a day since February, plus expenses of up to £300 a week without the need to provide receipts.

Larry Blevins, an IT consultant who was brought in from 
the United States to help sort out the trust’s computer 
system, received £25,000 a 
month plus thousands more in expenses.