ALMOST £1.5 billion was spent last year on extra managers and bureaucrats brought in to support Labour’s policy of “micro-managing” the health service, the Tories said yesterday.

The NHS workforce survey, published last week, shows that more than 15,000 NHS managers have been recruited since Labour came to power in 1997, an average of 2,222 a year. An extra 4,169 staff a year have been brought in to clerical and administrative roles, with 29,183 extra staff employed by 2004.

Chris Grayling, the Tory health spokesman, said that even with conservative estimates of salaries the extra cost was almost £1.5 billion — the equivalent of 52,000 nurses.

“These are quite startling figures,” Mr Grayling said. “To be spending £1.5 billion extra on bureaucracy which could be spent on patient care, more beds or more nurses is really quite extraordinary. If ever proof were needed that the Government has got the wrong priority for the health service, this is it. We could be doing so much more for this country if we pushed funding through to frontline services.”

Mr Grayling said that the calculation was based on a salary estimate of £45,000 for a manager or senior manager and £25,000 for staff doing clerical work, administration or in information technology. Using these figures, the extra spending on administrators totalled £1.42 billion in 2004, he said.

The Government last week rejected claims that its obsession with NHS performance targets had resulted in a huge number of bureaucrats responsible for monitoring and collating information. There was a 7.8 per cent rise in the number of central administration staff last year, including managers, while the number of doctors and nurses rose by 3.9 per cent.

Confronted in the Commons about the figures, John Reid, the Health Secretary, said that, of the 1.3 million people employed by the NHS, only 2.8 per cent were managers.

He dismissed suggestions that the number of bureaucrats was rising at double the rate of medical staff and said that the extra 8,000 doctors and 11,200 nurses recruited last year had brought their numbers to record levels.

The Healthcare Commission, the agency responsible for maintaining standards in the NHS and private healthcare, is attempting to streamline administrative work and reduce excess bureaucracy.

Spending on the NHS in England has almost doubled since Labour came to power, reaching £63.6 billion last year, compared with £33 billion in 1997. Yet a key indicator known as “finished consultant episodes” – which measures work completed by senior doctors – rose by only 9.9 per cent between 1998 and 2004.

Chris Philp, chairman of the Bow Group, the centre-right think tank, said: “In the past three years there have been more managers and administrators appointed than doctors, but productivity per person has gone down.”

Gill Morgan, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS managers, said that it was “fed up with the demonising of hardworking managers and support staff”.

Just 3 per cent of the 1.3 million NHS staff in England were managers or senior managers, while 13 per cent were in support services such as cleaning, catering, laundry and IT, she said. “Managerial and support staff are a vital part of the NHS team because they allow doctors, nurses and other frontline clinical staff to concentrate on what they do best – caring for patients,” she said.

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