Staffing & Use of Recruitment Agencies

Reference: 25-26390

Date response sent: 06/09/2026

Details of enquiry

I would like to receive data on:

1. The current number of executives, managers, and clinical staff employed by your trust (separately for each staff category)
2. The number of executives, managers, and clinical staff hired by your trust using a recruitment agency in each of the last 5 fiscal years, separately for each staff group
3. The annual staff turnover rate for each staff group over the last 5 fiscal years

Please see the following definitions to help you in processing this request:

• Executives: Any members of top-level trust leadership, such as Chair, Chief Executive, Executive Directors (e.g., medical director, nursing director, finance director, Chief Operating Officer) responsible for overall strategy, quality, and governance.
• Managers: Senior management, such as service or care group directors, heads of nursing, clinical directors, general managers, and heads of corporate departments, typically overseeing multiple departments or an entire division, as well as Middle managers and Frontline managers, such as matrons, ward or department managers, team leaders, and service managers who manage day-to-day operations and directly supervise clinical and non-clinical teams.
• Clinical staff: Frontline clinical staff and support staff

Response sent

1. The current number of executives, managers, and clinical staff employed by your trust (separately for each staff category)

13       Executives

134      Managers

315      Front line Clinical and Support staff

2. The number of executives, managers, and clinical staff hired by your trust using a recruitment agency in each of the last 5 fiscal years, separately for each staff group

The Trust confirms that it has not used recruitment agencies for the hiring of staff.  All our recruitment is done via the TRAC system whereby all our jobs are advertised on NHS Jobs, which can be accessed via this link: Search for jobs in the NHS

3. The annual staff turnover rate for each staff group over the last 5 fiscal years

The Trust does not hold its data in a way that allows us to electronically interrogate annual turnover for specific and/or generic roles such as those you have selected in question 1.

Our ESR (Electronic Staff Record) system only provides turnover by set staff groups and this has been provided in the tables below.

We have estimated that to provide this data for the 3 job titles in question 1 would require a manual review of each of 60 extensive monthly reports and individually analysing more than 1000 employee records. – We have estimate that it would be unrealistic to expect to conduct this analysis and answer your remaining questions within the 18 hours of resource provisioned under FOIA, our estimates are that these analyses alone would take around one hour each – thereby equating to 60 hours of officer time which significantly exceeds the 18 hours provisioned by FOIA, and that still has not covered analysis of the circa 1,000 employee records over the period.

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 has set the appropriate limit as £450 based on a generic charge of £25 per hour to determine whether the Trust holds the information, to locate, and then to extract it) – which all equates to 18 hours.

Section 12 of FOIA further states that the authority (ie this Trust) is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

This means that as the time required to process this question falls outside the cost limit for a whole request. Your question is therefore refused for provision of attrition data for Executives, Managers, and Front Line Clinical and Support Staff,  and exemption from disclosure has been engaged under s12 of FOIA.

Please find below the data which we can provide which is provided by our ESR for set groups of staff, as explained above: