October 24, 2019 3.34 pm This story is over 53 months old

Hospital trust’s £275k settlement agreement spend

The trust said it was ‘standard practice’
Lincoln County Hospital. Picture: Steve Smailes.

The trust which runs Lincolnshire’s hospitals spent £275,000 on settlement agreements with former staff in the last eight years.

A Freedom of Information request showed that United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust (ULHT) handed out 16 agreements with ex-employees since 2011.

The trust spent a total of £275,458.53 with the most amount of settlements handed out in the last financial year.

ULHT said the agreements were “standard practice in some cases” across the NHS and were mainly used to pay “outstanding contractual monies” to former staff.

A spokesperson for ULHT said: “Settlement agreements are standard practice across the NHS for some cases, and we believe they were the best way to secure agreement for financial payments owed to staff in these cases.

“They are used for a range of purposes, but within ULHT they are mainly used when outstanding contractual monies are owed to former staff, for some final redundancy payments and when we run Mutually-Agreed Resignation Schemes (MARS).”

The 2016/17 financial year saw the highest cost in agreements with £106,310 paid out to former staff.

The most paid out in a single agreement by ULHT since 2011 was £72,310.

ULHT said the sum was related to a redundancy payment and was paid in 2016/17.

Meanwhile, last year, the trust handed out the most settlements with five agreements reached at a cost of £3,657.07.

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