Bumper payout for NHS Tayside chief is baffling

MANY aspects of public life seem baffling, even irritating, to the man or woman in the street. They try to understand them. They fail. Meanwhile, the authorities enacting these peculiar decisions act as if they were strokes of genius that are difficult to explain – until pressed to do so by watchdogs.

Take the decision to pay erring NHS Tayside chief executive Lesley Mclay £32,105 more then she was contractually entitled to in her pay-off. NHS Scotland chief executive Paul Gray will have left many people spluttering when he declared this “reasonable” and that it “represented good value for money”.

What possible reason could he have for saying something so ostensibly bizarre? Well, his partially plausible explanation is that the pay-off represented less than the estimated costs of a potential legal battle over unfair dismissal. Less easy to explain was the sum being made up from Ms Mclay’s notice period having doubled from three to six months.

NHS Tayside believed this was required to bring parity with other chief executives across the NHS. However, Audit Scotland pointedly described this as “not correct”. Indeed, the public spending watchdog found that three months was the contractual notice period on seven NHS boards, making this odd attempt at egalitarianism of the elite entirely unmerited.

In terms of public spending, £32,000 is a small sum, but it’s the principle that matters, and principles don’t shrink to fit pay-offs. Apart from which, NHS Tayside also mistakenly paid Ms Mclay £19,135 in pension contributions.

These extras are more than many people earn in a year – some of them in the NHS – and, when most news about the NHS concerns the struggle for adequate resources, it’s not a good look to be making such handsome payments, particularly to someone who had to go after botching the use of funds. To the man or woman in the street, this whole business must remain utterly baffling.