Ministers are facing calls to tackle the NHS’s chronic lack of staff as figures reveal that the bill for hiring temporary frontline workers has soared to more than £10bn a year.

Hospitals and GP surgeries across the UK are paying a record £4.6bn for agency personnel and another £5.8bn for doctors and nurses on staff to do extra “bank” shifts to plug gaps in rotas.

Widespread short staffing has increasingly forced the service in all four home nations to hand colossal sums to employment agencies to hire stand-in workers. In England alone, the bill for agency staff, particularly nurses and GPs, has risen from £3bn to £3.5bn over the past year – a 16% rise.

The NHS in England currently has 42,306 vacant nursing posts.

There’s a simple reason the NHS is having to employ agency workers at exorbitant cost: the Tory government insists on under-paying regular staff.

Junior doctors now need a 35 per cent pay increase to reach real-terms parity with what they were getting in 2010 when the Tories came into government and started slashing everybody else’s pay (but not their own).

Nurses are suffering a similar shortfall.

And NHS bosses have the nerve to blame problems in the service on the strike action these dedicated medical professionals are having to take, simply to raise awareness of the plight that they – and the fat Tories in Westminster – have put them in!

With wages that are insufficient to cover their living costs, doctors and nurses are having to seek alternative employment – most commonly with the higher-paying health services of other countries or, ironically, with the agencies that are charging the NHS so much (including fat profits for their bosses, of course).

The answer, of course, is to bring doctors’ and nurses’ pay back up to what it should be. With agency fees so high, such a decision should pay for itself.

But the Tories don’t want to do that.

Conclusion: the Conservative government is deliberately starving the NHS of staff. They intend to destroy its ability to cope with public need in order to force people to pay for private, less effective and less professional treatment.

That is not the action of a government that has the best interests of the UK’s citizens at heart.

Remember it at the next election.

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