Almost £2bn spent on temporary nurses and midwives over five years
Scottish Labour said the figures are ‘unsustainable’
SNP ministers have been accused of “failing Scotland’s health service” after it emerged nearly £2 billion has been spent on agency and bank nurses and midwives over the past five years.
Figures highlighted by Scottish Labour show a bill of £1,904,286,884.04 was racked up between April 2020 and March 2025.
The spending was accumulated across all of Scotland’s 14 health boards, as well as in specialist services including the Scottish Ambulance Service, NHS 24, the State Hospital and the National Waiting Times Centre.
Despite improving on the previous year, the annual cost of agency and bank nurses in 2024/25 was still more than double the cost in 2018/19 and close to triple the cost in 2014/15, Scottish Labour said.
The party’s health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie said the figures are “unsustainable”.
She said: “The SNP has spent almost two decades mismanaging our health service, opting for short-term fixes, rather than coming up with a solution to address long-term challenges.
“The use of temporary staff is an expensive sticking plaster and cannot be a substitute for a proper plan aimed at tackling the significant problems facing the NHS.
“This is an unsustainable way of managing our health service and ministers must listen to calls for a workforce plan to meet recruitment needs.”
The total bill rose from £235,881,479 in the year ending March 31, 2021, to a height of £489,997,556 in the year to March 31, 2024, before falling in 2025, according to the analysis.
Of the 14 Scottish health boards, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde - the largest in Scotland - spent the most, followed by NHS Lothian. But NHS 24 was the biggest spender of any individual service.
Scottish Labour has repeatedly highlighted the level of spend on agency nurses and locum doctors, arguing it shows the NHS is “haemorrhaging money because of the SNP’s failure to recruit and retain frontline staff”.
Ten-year plan
The party has said it will ensure the NHS has a ten-year workforce plan that “creates domestic medical and nursing training places, values nurses, doctors and all NHS staff, and meets the needs of future generations of patients”.
The state of the health service is expected to be a key battleground in the run-up to the Holyrood election next year.
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “NHS Scotland’s overall workforce, including nursing and midwifery staffing, has increased over the last year, whilst the latest workforce statistics show a 62 per cent reduction in nurse agency usage and spend across 2024/25, decreasing for the second year in a row.
“These figures show the progress being made to reduce NHS Scotland’s reliance on agency workers and focus resources on frontline services, which has enabled boards to re-invest upwards of £94 million in the delivery of those services most valued by the Scottish public.
“The use of temporary staff in an organisation as large and complex as NHS Scotland will always be required to ensure vital service provision during times of unplanned absence, sickness or increased activity.”
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