Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to page 7 of the NAO Report of 18 January 2019 on NHS financial stability, what assessment his Department has made of the additional cost of agency staff as a result of staff shortages.

The Department recognises that staff shortages can mean trusts are required to recruit temporary staff through agencies to maintain safe staffing levels. Whilst a certain degree of temporary staffing is desirable to efficiently manage variable demand, engaging these staff through recruitment agencies is expensive, meaning trusts cannot always secure value for money.

To manage this cost, we are working with NHS Improvement to implement a number of measures to reduce agency expenditure and to support trusts to develop their own in-house staff banks, whereby individuals directly employed by the National Health Service can be deployed to fill a temporary shift, avoiding agency commission and the premium often charged by agencies. As a result of this work, total agency expenditure across NHS trusts in England has fallen from a peak of £3.6 billion in 2015/16 to £2.4 billion in 2017/18 – a £1.2 billion reduction.

The NHS Improvement Agency Programme is committed to further reducing agency spend by monitoring trusts’ compliance with the Agency Rules and supporting them to develop their in-house banks in a way that makes better use of workforce deployment technology, such as e-rostering and acuity modelling.