NHS Rich List

The TaxPayers’ Alliance, a UK pressure group concerned by government waste and profligacy among public bodies, has released the results of its latest research regarding the National Health Service. It has even compiled an NHS Rich List, about which I shall let it speak for itself:

The findings are truly staggering. In 2023-24, there were 1,694 senior managers receiving more than £100,000 in total remuneration. Of these, 1,557 had salary entitlements over £100,000, including 279 receiving between £200,000 and £300,000 and 17 who received over £300,000. A total of 512 senior NHS managers had higher salaries than the prime minister!

But we didn’t just look at salaries, we looked at the performance of the trusts they work in so you can decide whether they deserved it. For example, the highest paid NHS senior manager, Ann James, chief executive of University Hospitals Plymouth, received almost £400,000 in total remuneration. This Trust ranked 95 out of 136 in England for A&E waiting times.

East Cheshire was the worst performing trust for A&E four-hour waits at 50.6 per cent yet it had eight senior managers receiving over £100,000, including the director of people and culture who received £367,500.

Cambridge and Peterborough was the worst performing trust for referral to treatment median waiting times at 32.1 weeks. This trust had 8 senior managers earning over £100,000, including their chief medical director who received £387,500.

Generous pay packages may be appropriate to attract the hardest-working, most talented persons, but if NHS managers are talented, they must have honed the virtue of modesty, hiding their lights under very thick bushels. The under-equipped frontline nurses and junior doctors, the understaffed wards, the long waiting lists: all of these, in my simple mind, could be solved by dispensing with a few of those ‘Directors of People and Cultures’ and reallocating the funds. 

The current NHS reminds me of the late medieval Church in England. Well meaning but ill-resourced lower clergy at local level often doing their best, but under enormously remunerated bishops, archbishops and cardinals at the higher level, enjoying multiple palaces and dinners large enough to feed a family. If Nigel Lawson was correct, and the NHS is the closest thing we have to a British national religion, then the NHS is the pre-Reformation church, the gigantic leviathan which consumes and gobbles, and, courtesy of its abortion clinics and its 17 Gender Identity Services, it spreads moral and spiritual darkness. In the meantime, a large number of individuals make a nice living out of it. It is time for another Reformation of church and state. 

The rich man is wise in his own eyes, but the poor who has understanding searches him out. Proverbs 28:11, NKJV

Image by Alan from Pixabay