NHS deckchair shuffle costs £430m

"It is odd that NHS staff resist reorganisation so tenaciously, given that it can so easily turn into a bonanza", says The Times.

When Andrew Lansley, the former health secretary, announced that "clinical commissioning groups" would replace "primary care trusts", sceptics suggested that he would be sacking a whole cadre of health workers only to re-employ them "with a shiny new badge". And that seems to have been exactly what happened.

The resulting 10,000 NHS redundancies which cost £430m, according to the National Audit Office were followed by plenty of staff returning to the fold, including one married couple who had received close to £1m in severance payments.

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The blame game has started, says Haley Dixon in The Daily Telegraph. Labour has accused the Coalition of abusing "precious NHS resources", while Tory ministers retorted that the previous government had drawn up "lax contracts" and that this was the price for "dismantling Labour's bloated bureaucracy".

Downing Street is now urging the NHS to claw back' redundancy payments made to managers who have been re-employed, with Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, saying that the health service must not "make the same mistakes as the BBC, where a culture of excessive pay and pay-offs was tolerated for too long".

Only two NHS managers seem to have "felt uncomfortable enough to forgo some pay", says Camilla Cavendish in The Sunday Times. But who can blame them legally, they're just accepting their contractual entitlements, while morally they're taking their cues from the self-serving attitudes and acceptance of greed established by senior politicians.

"While there has never been a golden age of propriety, the generations that fought in two world wars seem to have had a sharper sense that it was the duty of officers to set an example and to feed their troops before themselves. If that sounds patrician, it is still true that those of us further down the tree take our cues from the top."