Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much NHS Property Services spent on (a) redundancy payments to staff, (b) temporary staff and (c) external consultants in each year since it was established.

As part of the national restructuring and improvement process in how the NHS Estate is managed, NHS Property Services was created in 2013. NHS Property Services (NHSPS) inherited a chaotically managed NHS Estate from primary care trusts and strategic health authorities and has spent the past 21 months restructuring and reducing unnecessary administration and back office costs. As a result, to date, in order to reduce ongoing bureaucratic and back office costs, NHSPS has spent £14 million on redundancy costs for 197 staff as part of its business redesign programme. Changes and reforms to staffing at NHSPS have resulted in ongoing annual savings of £7 million. ‘Claw back’ provisions for redundancy pay apply to staff who leave under voluntary redundancy and are re-employed by the same or another NHS employer within six months; and to staff who leave under compulsory redundancy and are re-employed by the same or another NHS employer within four weeks.

The total spend by NHSPS on temporary management/office staff during 2013-14 was £10.6 million.

Spend on external consultants is not separated out in NHSPS’s ledgers from spend on legal and other professional services within the NHSPS budget. In total, NHSPS spent £14.3 million on external legal, professional and other consultancy services in 2013-14.