Was Keir Starmer right to claim agency staff cost the NHS ‘£5,000 a shift’?

In a speech earlier this month the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer suggested the NHS is paying £5,000 a shift for temporary agency staff.

Speaking at the King’s Fund think tank and responding to Lord Darzi's investigation into the state of the NHS in England, Mr Starmer said: “I’m not prepared to see even more of your money spent on agency staff who cost £5,000 a shift.”

It’s not clear what this is based on. We asked the Labour party, which referred us to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and Number 10. The DHSC also referred us to Number 10. Number 10 did not respond. When Government departments and ministers make unevidenced claims and don’t publish data to support these claims, the public don’t have the ability to scrutinise and challenge claims made by those in power.

It’s possible that the £5,000 figure refers to data that the Labour party obtained via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request covering the 2021/22 financial year. If so, Mr Starmer’s claim was missing important context, because while the data did show one NHS trust paid over £5,000 for one agency doctor’s shift, this wasn’t a typical figure and most paid far less.

We’ve not been able to find the full set of FOI data, which was published in late 2022, and Labour did not respond to our request for a copy. But according to media reports at the time, around 40% of “major hospital trusts” responded to the party’s questions.

Labour’s FOI data reportedly showed that the most expensive shift reported by these trusts cost £5,234 and was paid for a doctor by Northern Care Alliance NHS Trust in Greater Manchester. According to the BBC, this figure didn’t just include the money going to the doctor, but covered “the agency fee and other employer costs as well”.

Labour’s analysis reportedly found that three quarters of trusts that responded spent more than £2,000 for at least one shift, while one in three paid more than £3,000.

These figures are the maximum spent, however, and don’t give us much idea about the typical amount spent on agency shifts. We’ve not been able to find any reliable data on the average cost, or more recent data on the maximum spent.

NHS Providers told Full Fact that it was not aware of any publicly available data on how much the NHS spends on agency staff per shift, and that the data would likely be held by individual trusts. The Nuffield Trust think tank also told us it was not aware of any such data being published.