Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the average annual cost to the public purse of NHS agency staff; and if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of pay rates for agency staff on the pay rate of NHS employees.

In 2016 NHS England introduced price caps for agency shifts, setting out the recommended maximum hourly charge that a trust should pay for agency staff. As a consequence of this and other measures, agency spend remained stable at approximately £2.4 billion per year from 2017/18 to 2020/21.

For National Health Service employees, the Pay Review Body (PRB) process is the established mechanism for determining pay uplifts in the public sector, outside of negotiating multi-year pay and contract reform deals. As the PRBs are independent, we cannot pre-empt their recommendations, and we will carefully consider their reports when we receive them later this year.

As a result of the 2022/23 pay recommendations, over one million NHS staff including nurses, paramedics and midwives have received at least a £1,400 increase.