By Lucy Ashton
The SNP have been accused of “failing Scotland’s health service” as it emerged that nearly £2 billion has been spent on agency and bank nurses and midwives over the last five years.
Figures highlighted by Scottish Labour shows that a bill of £1,904,286,884.04 has been racked up between April 2020 and March 2025.
The spending was accumulated across all of Scotland’s 14 health boards, as well as from specialist services including the Scottish Ambulance Service and NHS 24.
Despite some improvement 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.
However, Scottish Labour has long warned about the impact of the SNP’s failure to recruit permanent staff whilst vacancies for nurses and midwives remain at over 2,600.
Scottish Labour Health spokesperson Jackie Baillie MSP, left, 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.”
NHS Scotland workforce | Turas Data Intelligence
There were 2601.2 nursing and midwifery vacancies as of 31 March 2025: https://turasdata.nes.nhs.scot/data-and-reports/official-workforce-statistics/all-official-statistics-publications/03-june-2025-workforce/dashboards/nhs-scotland-workforce/?pageid=14063