Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many NHS staff have been made redundant and subsequently re-employed by NHS organisations on a (a) permanent and (b) fixed-term contract basis since the provisions of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 came into force.

The current redundancy terms for National Health Service staff were laid down in 2006, however this Government is working to improve value for the tax payer by introducing legislation in the form of the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill which is due to receive Royal Assent in March 2015. This Bill allows for recovery of contractual redundancy payments when an individual earning over £100,000 returns to the same subsector (eg NHS or local government) within a year of the termination date. This Bill will come into effect in 2016.

The number of NHS staff made redundant between 1 April 2013 and 30 June 2014 (the latest date for which redundancy data is published), and subsequently reemployed on a permanent contract is 618 and on a fixed term contract is 274. These include only those reemployed up until 30 November 2014. The number made redundant over that period is 5,714.

These estimates are derived from unvalidated data from the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) Data Warehouse, and so only cover redundancies from, and re-employment to those organisations that use ESR. Two NHS trusts do not use ESR.

The figures above relate to redundancies across the whole of the NHS including those as a result of the Health and Social Care Act reforms. However, the Government’s changes to the NHS mean a huge net gain for the taxpayer. My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, issued a written ministerial statement on 22 July 2014; Official Reports, column 119WS setting out the costs and benefits of NHS modernisation. The total costs are expected to be no higher than £1.5billion, which includes £456 million spent on staff redundancies to the end of March 2014. Any costs associated with the recent NHS reforms are one-off and dwarfed by the savings they will make: £6.4 billion during this Parliament and £1.5 billion every year thereafter, for patient care.