Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many times NHS trusts have breached the agency cap due to exceptional safety grounds in each of the last 12 months for which figures are available.

The rules on agency spending were designed with patient safety in mind. To ensure patient safety, providers are allowed to pay an additional rate or use a non-framework agency on exceptional patient safety grounds. Each trust is required to have their own policy that identifies when it is appropriate to use the override, and an internal escalation process to ensure that the use of the clause is appropriate. The table below sets out the number of overrides, for both clinical and non-clinical staff groups, since the price cap was set at 55% above basic rate on 1 April 2016.