This is an incredible story of hubris and incompetence which has placed the safety of mental health services at risk due to the subsequent recruitment crisis as well as wasting millions of pounds.
However, it is vital that people who depend on mental health services do not pay the price of the NHS bureaucracy’s repeated mistakes. Those who failed to properly fund, manage, regulate and supervise Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) must find the money to put matters right. That’s £30 million, Norman ‘mental health champion’ Lamb.
Norfolk and Suffolk’s mental health provider, which is being investigated for running up a £2m deficit, paid £8.8 million in exit and redundancy payments last year – more than anyone else in the country.
It meant almost a tenth of all staff severance payments paid out by NHS foundation trusts came from the Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust (NSFT) in 2013/14. Across the country £92.4m was paid, according to analysis by the Health Service Journal (HSJ).
The year before, severance payments cost the NSFT £8.2m.
The huge redundancy bill included £307,500 paid to one director. Daren Clark, director of operations for specialised services in Suffolk, received the highest payment of anyone made redundant by a foundation trust in the country last year. His redundancy package included pension contributions.
It was one of three redundancy payments made by the trust of more than £200,000.
Terry Skyrme, from the Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk, said: “It is just a phenomenal amount. I think it is a national scandal, the amount management is paid in salaries and redundancy payments.”
Read the Tom Bristow’s full story on the EDP website by clicking on the image below:
