Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the (a) year-to-date and (b) forecast out-turn spend is in each NHS (i) trust and (ii) foundation trust on total agency nursing costs, excluding outsourced bank, in 2015-16.

Last year the Government introduced a series of tough financial controls to help the National Health Service tackle overspending on expensive agency staff. Although, it is not possible to provide the information requested by individual NHS trust or foundation trust, NHS Improvement has confirmed that a total of £3.64 billion was spent on agency and contract staff in 2015-16. This represents a saving of £300 million to the NHS, which had been on course to spend up to £4 billion prior to the controls being put in place.

NHS Improvement has also set each NHS trust and foundation trust an annual expenditure ceiling on the total amount that can be spent on agency staff in 2016-17. Again, it is not possible to provide the information requested by individual NHS trust or foundation trust; however all trusts have been allocated ceilings for 2016-17 and these will be monitored by NHS Improvement on a monthly basis going forwards.