NHS planning has been a disastrous failure, leading to an uncontrolled boom in the workforce followed by a bust in budgets, a report by MPs says.

The health service set out in 1999 to recruit 20,000 more nurses by 2004 but hired 67,878 — 340 per cent over target. It also recruited twice as many GPs as planned and 69 per cent more health professionals, such as physiotherapists.

As the inflated workforce had to be paid, hospitals and trusts plunged into deficit, the Commons Health Select Committee report says. Now posts are being left empty or lost, and a few NHS workers are being made compulsorily redundant. More than half of newly qualified physiotherapists have failed to find work in the NHS.

The MPs are scathing about the failure to maintain a link between staff numbers and the money available to pay them. Instead of raising productivity to meet targets, the NHS “threw new staff into the task rather than consider the most cost-effective way of doing the job”, the report says.

It calls the staff expansion “reckless and uncontrolled” and says that funding increases were often seen as a blank cheque for recruiting new staff. There is also criticism of generous contracts. “Large pay increases were granted without adequate steps being taken to ensure increases in productivity in return,” it said.

The committee urged the Government to make workforce planning a priority, and for an end to constant health service reorganisation.

Stephen O’Brien, the Shadow Health Minister, said: “Top-down workforce targets imposed by Labour have created confusion amongst NHS staff. Patients are bewildered about where all the money has gone, and hard-working staff are losing confidence by the day in Labour’s stewardship of the NHS.”

The British Medical Association did not entirely endorse the report, however. Sam Everington, its deputy chairman, said: “While agreeing wholeheartedly that integrated workforce planning must be a priority... we do not agree that the expansion of the medical workforce was reckless and uncontrolled and that pay increases for doctors have not seen a return in productivity.

“The UK is still critically short of doctors and the BMA has always believed that government goals to increase doctor numbers were too low.”

Andy Burnham, the Health Minister, said: “While the pay contracts cost more than we or the trade unions and professional associations first anticipated, we must remember that we were setting right an NHS system with widespread recruitment difficulties. We have been able to eliminate these and reward hard-working professionals with the pay they deserve.”

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