Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many retired NHS staff returned to work in the NHS in each of the last five years.
The National Health Service is committed to offering flexible retirement options to help it attract and retain experienced staff.
The Department does not hold data covering all staff who may have begun claiming their NHS pension (either with or without a break in service) and who subsequently returned in any given time period. NHS England do publish quarterly data on the ‘reasons for leaving’ that are recorded in the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) on staff leaving National Health Service Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) bodies. One of these is ‘flexible retirement’, which is used to show where bodies know the member of staff is returning to service after ‘leaving’. This likely, but not necessarily, requires a break in service. If, for example, someone moves to shorter hours, and takes a portion of their pension, local processes in ESR may generate a ‘reason for leaving’ record. The table below shows the headcount number of staff recorded with a ‘flexible retirement’ reason for leaving for each of the past five financial years.
Financial Year | Headcount number of HCHS staff with recorded ‘reason for leaving’ as ‘flexible retirement’ |
2018/19 | 4,180 |
2019/20 | 4,806 |
2020/21 | 4,721 |
2021/22 | 6,293 |
2022/23 | 5,752 |
Sometimes staff may not be certain of returning when they initially retire, or NHS bodies may not be aware of staff intentions, and as such the above may be an underestimate.