Exclusive: Top managers keep jobs after 700 posts are cut in health shake-up

TOP health executives in Yorkshire escaped the axe in the first round of a massive NHS reorganisation which saw nearly 700 jobs lost in the region.

Only a handful of around 100 of the most senior managers in the region’s 14 primary care trusts (PCTs) and strategic health authority (SHA) faced redundancy or took early retirement in 2010-11 in the initial phase of cuts ordered by Ministers to slash running costs by 45 per cent by 2014.

Analysis by the Yorkshire Post calculates that payouts worth more than £20m were made to around 660 mainly administrative staff.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Figures show only three board-level executives in the region left the NHS, with payouts worth between £155,000 and £185,000 each. Each chief executive from the 15 organisations remains employed, although the majority are in different roles.

The findings offer further evidence that top executives are being retained amid concerns about the huge upheaval facing the NHS as doctors take over responsibility for spending at the same time as an unprecedented £20bn efficiency drive is implemented.

NHS Barnsley said it made 100 people made redundant at a cost of £1.9m; NHS Hull made 74 staff redundant, costing £3.7m; and nearly £3m was spent by health chiefs in North Yorkshire on 57 redundancies, including one unnamed official who received more than £200,000.

NHS Leeds said it spent £2.3m on 58 redundancies and NHS Kirklees spent £2m on 38.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The Yorkshire Post, which has based its analysis on official returns from the organisations or their accounts, calculates that the average redundancy payout to staff was more than £32,000.

Management costs at the organisations still ran to £164m in 2010-11.

Of the 15 chief executives, five are running PCTs which have now been merged into clusters, three have moved to senior roles at the SHA and one is on secondment at the Department of Health. Two have been appointed chief executives at other NHS trusts, two others continue to work at PCTs but not as chief executives, and another is in a less senior role at a NHS trust.

Strategic health authority chief Bill McCarthy will in October take up a post charged with setting up the new NHS Commissioning Board based in Leeds, which will have overall charge of the health service.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

A SHA spokesman disputed the scale of the job losses in the region, which he said “do not correspond with our official workforce figures”.

He added: “The NHS in Yorkshire and the Humber, along with the rest of the country, has been given the task of making management cost savings in order to reinvest the money saved into front-line services and we are on course to reach the target set by the Department of Health.

“Wherever possible the NHS in Yorkshire and the Humber has avoided making compulsory redundancies in order to retain the talent, experience and leadership needed to support the NHS in this period of change and maintain a high quality of services for patients.”

David Stout, director of the NHS Confederation’s Primary Care Trust Network, said there were practical reasons for keeping people on to maintain expertise as reforms were implemented.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“There is a big task to manage the transition which increases the demands on management rather than reduces them,” he said.

“More generally we are also looking to make sure we don’t need to pay redundancy to staff only to see them reappear in other guises six months or a year down the line.”

Ministers claim their plans for health service reconfiguration will save £5bn by 2015 and £1.7bn year thereafter but the timetable for the abolition of PCTs and the SHA has already slipped, raising doubts over the size of savings. A revised assessment is due shortly.