350 NHS managers are paid more than the PM
MORE than 350 NHS managers in England pocket hundreds of thousands in salaries.
The highest paid manager in the health service – run by chief executive Sir Simon Stevens – collected a salary of £478,000 last year.
That is almost three times as much as Boris Johnson, who receives just under £160,000.
In total, 23 are getting more than £250,000 while another 351 receive between £150,000 and £250,000.
The latest NHS figures reveal these 374 managers were paid a total of £64.4million last year.
Chief medical officer Chris Whitty is paid between £205,000 and £210,000, while chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance is on up to £185,000. These salaries are separate to the NHS managers’ pay.
By comparison, a new hospital doctor gets paid around £35,000, while nurses average £33,540.
The pay statistics show there are now more than 2,000 managers within the NHS in England who are being paid six-figure salaries.
The average senior manager now receives £80,357 – a rise of six per cent in the past five years, when their pay stood at £76,071. It means their pay has increased by around £860 a year in recent times, while nurses have seen their pay rise by just £510 a year over the same five-year period.
John O’connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Sky-high pay for backroom bosses is a worry for taxpayers, even before frontline services were stretched by Covid
19. No one begrudges paying doctors and nurses well for the tough jobs they do but it is galling to see NHS managers, even at failing hospitals, continuing to rake in the cash.
“The rewards-for-failure culture in the health service costs patients dear and must be stamped out once this pandemic is over.”
An NHS England spokesman said: “We have one of the most efficient health services in the world, with administrative costs of less than 2p in every pound of NHS funding, compared to 5p in Germany and 6p in France. “That provides taxpayers with excellent value for money.
“The NHS has outperformed the productivity of the wider economy since 2010.”
Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “England’s 216 NHS trusts are responsible for £80billion of expenditure every year. They employ more than 800,000 staff and treat a million patients every 36 hours.
“They are large and complex organisations providing a key public service, with the public describing the NHS as the institution that makes them most proud to be British – more so than the monarchy, the BBC and the Armed Forces.
“Individual trusts have budgets of up to £1.6billion and 16,000 staff – bigger than many FTSE 250 companies. The median total renumeration for a FTSE 250 company CEO is £1.5million a year. For a FTSE 250 company finance director it’s £1million a year.
“Given the complexity and size of the services, budgets and workforces that our 1,000-plus trust executive board directors oversee, these rates of pay seem more than reasonable by comparison.”