Agency Nurses: Expenditure
(asked on 19th February 2024) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much NHS England spent on agency nurses in each of the last five years.
The amount spent on agency nurses by year for each of the last five years is set out in the table below.
Financial Year | Agency (nursing) spend |
2018-19 | £843 million |
2019-20 | £879 million |
2020-21 | £838 million |
2021-22 | £1.1 billion |
2022-23 | £1.37 billion |
The Long Term Workforce Plan sets out a path to reduce the National Health Service’s reliance on agency. We estimate that the reliance on temporary staffing in FTE terms will reduce from 9% in 2021/22 to around 5% from 2032/33 onwards, with mostly bank staff fulfilling the requirement for temporary staffing.