Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the answer by Earl Howe on 9 July (HL Deb, col 216) and Written Answer on 29 July (WA 286), how the figure of 19,300 fewer administrative staff was calculated.

The source of the data is the NHS Hospital & Community Health Service (HCHS) monthly workforce statistics - Provisional Statistics published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre. This covers directly employed staff working in the National Health Service and excludes staff working in general practice.

The figure of 19,300 (rounded down to the nearest hundred) is the decrease in the full time equivalent number of ‘infrastructure support’ staff between May 2010 (204,695) and February 2014 (185,319). Infrastructure support includes staff that are coded as senior managers, managers, clerical and administrative staff in central functions and all staff in hotel, property and estates; it does not include administration staff that provide direct support to clinicians, such as medical secretaries and ward receptionists.

Based on the latest available data, for April 2014, the number of full time equivalent infrastructure support staff stands at 184,533 and the reduction since May 2010 at over 20,100 (20,161 – rounded down to the nearest whole number).