A SLAP IN THE FACE
How NHS pay for hospital bosses soars.. ..As burnt-out nurses struggle on 1% offer
NHS bosses are earning up to £300,000 a year including bonuses – more than NINE TIMES the average pay of nurses.
A Sunday Mirror NHS wages investigation today reveals how the top 10 hospital chief executives are raking in huge sums while the lowest paid frontline staff have had their wages cut in real terms.
It comes as new official figures show the health service also now has an astonishing 2,788 “very senior managers”– which include chiefs – across all trusts earning at least £110,000 each and costing the taxpayer £395million a year.
The findings have enraged union leaders representing burnt-out nurses and ambulance workers offered a pay rise of just 1% after risking their lives throughout the pandemic.
The sickening statistics emerge after a year in which the Tories wasted £22billion in taxpayers’ money on poor
PPE and a failed Test and Trace system, a figure projected to top £37billion in 2022.
GMB union national officer Rachel Harrison stormed: “This is a slap in the face for our members who will feel utterly betrayed to hear about these earnings as they struggle to make ends meet after a year of hell.” To add to their fury we can reveal that the highest paid hospital boss is at a Trust that is deemed to be failing by the country’s health watchdog.
Professor Clive Kay, chief executive of King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust– which runs three sites in South London and Kent – earned from £295,000 to £300,000 in 2019/20. Prof Kay, who took over in April 2019, is yet to sort out a Trust rated by the Care Quality Commission as “requiring improvement” since 2015. There has been no full inspection since his appointment, but the latest CQC visit solely looking at King’s College Hospital’s A&E – resulted in a “requiring improvement” rating seven months after he took up the job.
The Trust, also in financial special measures, had more than half a billion pounds of debt written off by the Government last year.
Getting the same as Prof Kay at the top of the list was Ken Bremner, chief of South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust. His basic £260,000 salary was boosted by performance pay and bonuses after a CQC
rating of “good”. Third in the list for 2019/20 is Dr Bruno Holthof, chief of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust rated by the CQC as “requiring improvement”. He earned between £293,000 and £298,000, including £8,000 taxable expenses.
The list below also shows two other chiefs raking it in at failing NHS Trusts labelled “requires improvement” – Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael Van der Watt of West Hertfordshire Hospitals and Prof Tim Orchard, of Imperial College Healthcare. The top 10 chiefs’ pay figures make uncomfortable reading compared to NHS lowerpaid workers – including nurses earning around £33,000 and porters and cleaners on around £19,000.
The Government is proposing a paltry 1% pay rise for them, even though inflation is expected to be between 1.5% and 2% this year.
The Royal College of Nursing says nurses deserve 12.5% to recognise the skill, responsibility and experience they demonstrate. The lowest-paid nurses’ salary has risen by 20% since 2009/10 – from £20,710 to £24,907 – but with inflation it’s a real terms pay cut of 12.3%. RCN steward Mike Travis, a children’s nurse in Liverpool for 42 years, said he found the earnings of very senior managers infuriating. “It’s not about what the bosses earn, their jobs are substantially different to what we do,” he said.
“But it’s obscene the salaries of very senior managers have risen so much over the years until they are anything up to nine times that of a band five nurse who has seen no rebanding re-evaluation of their job since 2002. And it’s also obscene that bonuses are being paid on top of these wages.”
Very Senior Managers are not governed by the normal NHS staff pay bands. Instead their salaries are decided by independent remuneration committees. Any salary awarded above £150,000 needs approval by NHS England and at ministerial level.
GMB’s Ms Harrison said: “Ambulance workers, cleaners, porters, catering staff, midwives, nurses and more have risked their lives working with inadequate PPE and a chronic staffing crisis after a decade of budget slashing. To make up for 10 years of real terms pay cuts, GMB estimates they need a pay increase of 15%.”
Chris Hopson, chief of NHS Providers that represents Trusts, said the chiefs’ rates of pay “seem more than reasonable” compared to company directors and given the size of the services, budgets and workforces they oversee.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “Pay rises in the rest of the public sector will be paused this year, but we will continue to provide pay rises for NHS workers.”
Imperial College Healthcare said it hadn’t had a full CQC inspection since 2014, so the overall rating did not reflect recent individual services rated from “good” to “outstanding”.
South Tyneside and Sunderland Trust said: “The salaries of our executive leadership team are decided by an independent remuneration committee to ensure we attract and retain the highest calibre of people.”