Ooh Matron! Nurse is waving her wages at me!

It is a sad reflection, following on from the Settle shopkeeper, that there are organisations where money isn't exchanged so well. The National Health Service is one example. Admittedly being vastly larger than a small shop, it is nevertheless proper budgeting that is a necessary requisite. So we now hear, through the Freedom of Information Act, that some agency nurses cost £250,000 a year (pro-rata) to the NHS. In all, the NHS spent almost £800 million on agency staff.

Of course, if the hospitals were managed better, then none of this extravagant nonsense would be happening. Agencies are getting rich because of others' incompetence. Nothing new there, but surely it is high time to change this slack attitude to easy hiring of staff. And it's not the nurses getting all this money, although some do better than permanent staff nurses. It is the agency contractors who have "overheads".

Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley is right. He obtained the figures for us to see. He says, "For years the Government have been telling us how many extra staff they have hired for the NHS. So surely we should have reached a situation by now where we no longer need to keep paying out millions each year to agencies and their staff? It is a dreadful waste of taxpayers' money at a time when we can least afford it."

But New Labour are rather like the Pushmi-pullyu. The want to say they are spending money and getting things right whilst at the same time saying that everything is managed by agencies, imlpying a hands-off approach to responsibility.

So £800 million being tossed in the direction of employment agencies is no real surprise. Onwards with the change!