Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent estimate he has made of the average cost to the NHS of employing a paramedic in the last year for which figures are available; and what forecast he has made of the equivalent cost in each year from 2013-14 to 2016-17.

In 2013-14, the estimated average paybill per full time equivalent (FTE) for qualified ambulance staff in England was around £46,000. This includes earnings plus the costs of employer pension and national insurance contributions.[1]

Significant changes in the average paybill per FTE are not expected over that period in 2016-17.

However, we do not have reliable future forecasts of exact costs for the next three years, as it depends on factors such as recruitment, retirement and fluctuations in non-basic earnings such as overtime.

^[1]Source: Department of Health’s Headline HCHS Paybill Metrics which are primarily based on earnings data published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre, supplemented by employer pension and national insurance contributions estimates informed by unpublished and unvalidated data from the Electronic Staff Record Data Warehouse.