Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what proportion of the NHS budget in England and Wales was spent on management and administration in (a) 1984, (b) 1994, (c) 2004 and (d) 2013.

This Government has taken tough decisions to increase the National Health Service budget by £12.7 billion between 2010-11 and 2014-15. During this period, the Government’s NHS reforms will enable total administration costs to reduce by one-third in real terms, to release funding to NHS front-line services. Already, savings arising from the reforms released £1.5 billion last year and £1 billion in 2012-13 to front-line services.

Administration costs as a proportion of total NHS expenditure in the financial year 2013-14 was 2.9%. In 2010-11 the equivalent proportion was 4.3%.

From 2010 to July 2014, the number of infrastructure support staff in the NHS has reduced by from 205,695 to 183,685 a decrease of 21,010 (10.3%) including a decrease of 7,488 (17.7%) in managers and senior managers combined.

Before introducing administration costs in the Spending Review 2010, the Department collected data on NHS “management costs”, part of which now forms a sub-set of the current administration cost definition.

Management costs in primary care trusts/strategic health authorities and NHS trusts as a share of total NHS expenditure in 2003-04 was 3.7%.

Data for years 1984 and 1994 is not available.

This Government remains committed to reducing both management costs within the NHS and administration costs across the system in order to reduce bureaucracy and increase frontline care staff.