The NHS is being “ripped off” by private agencies who make huge profits from recruiting doctors to hospitals, the Mail can reveal.
Driven by a chronic recruitment crisis, health chiefs are being forced to cough up around £500m a year to fill empty shifts with agency staff.
One agency director alone paid himself more than £1m last year, while bosses pocket around 20 per cent of the fees paid by the beleaguered health service.
It has become so lucrative – profits in the sector have increased six-fold in just three years – that their peers on social media are encouraging young doctors to leave the private sector.
Agency bosses, desperate to recruit more staff, are in turn offering incentives including iPads, spa breaks and £1,000 furniture vouchers.
Some agencies are trying to poach doctors by offering them £5,000 Rolex watches and luxury holidays in exchange for referrals.
It comes after Health Secretary Wes Streeting vowed to ban the NHS from spending “eye-watering sums” on temporary staff to fill 113,000 vacant posts.
Activists said “scam” companies should be “run out of town.”
An anonymous director of ID Medical Group was awarded £1,134,017 in 2023. Dr Mo Sacoor (pictured) founded the company in 2002. Photos show the 85-year-old football madman enjoying several lavish trips, including the World Cup in Brazil.
ID Medical Group Holdings posted an operating profit of £7.8m in 2023, up from £3m in 2021. A director, Adrien Faure, is married to Maria Baibakova, the daughter of a Russian billionaire. Here the couple is shown together.
Layla Moran MP, chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, said: “Sufficient staffing across the NHS is a serious and complex issue, but it is unacceptable that locum bodies are making excessive profits from the NHS, when we all know that “The NHS is under immense financial pressure.”
The Mail audited ten leading locum agencies to find out how much money was being made from fees charged to the taxpayer-funded NHS.
Instead of covering the annual salary of 14,000 full-time nurses, the estimated £500m in fees is boosting the profits of private companies.
The NHS is already spending more than £3bn on temporary workers such as nurses, while NHS trusts are paying up to £2,000 for a single nursing shift, with strikes driving up costs further.
The health service has fought hard to reduce spending on agency staff and set a salary cap of 150 percent of the standard salary in 2015.
But trusts can make exceptions if necessary and costs have soared during the pandemic, with spending now up 25 per cent in 2019/20.
As a result, some agencies have seen their profits skyrocket.
Cook Recruitment Group, which runs National Locums, Locum People and The GP Team, posted an operating profit of £2.9m in 2024, up from just £483,523 in 2021, a six-fold increase.
The NHS is being ‘ripped off’ by private agencies who make huge profits from recruiting doctors to hospitals (file image)
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has vowed to ban the NHS from spending “eye-watering sums” on temporary staff to fill 113,000 vacancies.
Its employees have already been rewarded with an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean, where they were photographed sipping cocktails at a luxury hotel.
The company is a family affair, and directors David Cook, his brother Glenn and his wife Jenny founded the company in 2018. The highest-paid director pocketed £152,000 last year.
But this is a small change compared to the £1,134,017 paid to an unnamed director of ID Medical Group in 2023.
Dr. Mo Sacoor founded the company in 2002 and, judging by his Facebook posts, has enjoyed the fruits of its success ever since.
Photos show the 85-year-old football madman enjoying several lavish trips to Portugal, including the Champions League final in 2014, the World Cup in Brazil that same year and the Caribbean.
ID Medical Group Holdings reported an operating profit of £7.8 million in 2023, up from £3 million in 2021.
In January this year, the business was sold to US company Aya Healthcare, and Dr Sacoor left the company. Its latest accounts show profits fell to £6 million in 2024.
Acacium Group, the UK’s largest surrogate group, reported revenue of £1.4bn in 2023, of which around half came from UK operations.
It recorded an after-tax profit of £3.1m. However, this figure was down from £50m in 2022, with finance director Thomas Richards citing the health services’ desire to “reduce spending on contingent labor following the end of the Covid pandemic.” .
Despite falling profits, its highest-paid director still earned £341,000 last year.
One director, Adrien Faure, is married to Maria Baibakova, the daughter of a Russian billionaire, who once wrote an article for Tatler magazine detailing the best way to fire a servant.
The group, which operates Thornbury Nursing Services, has previously offered doctors and nurses an extraordinary range of incentives to take up locum jobs, fueling concerns that doctors are being lured away from full-time NHS jobs only to be lent again at a higher cost.
Incentives offered by Acacium reportedly included iPads, spa breaks worth hundreds of pounds and furniture vouchers worth £1,000.
Other agencies have tried to poach doctors by offering them £5,000 Rolex watches and luxury holidays in exchange for referrals.
Streeting’s plans could ban trusts from using agencies to fill gaps in entry-level jobs such as healthcare assistants and home support workers.
Agencies could also be banned from recruiting doctors who leave permanent NHS jobs.
Driven by a chronic recruitment crisis, health bosses are forced to hand over an estimated £500m a year to fill empty shifts with agency staff (file image)
The Health Secretary told The Mail: ‘For too long desperate hospitals have been forced to pay huge sums of money for temporary staff, costing taxpayers billions and forcing experienced staff out of the NHS. “We are not going to allow the NHS to be defrauded any more.”
Dennis Reed, of campaign group Silver Voices, congratulated the Mail for exposing the extent of the scandal.
He said: ‘It would be much cheaper to run an in-house bank for NHS staff rather than paying these fraudulent agency fees. These parasitic agencies should be expelled from the city.
However, he added that Streeting needed to “provide an alternative solution to recruiting temporary staff”.
An NHS spokesperson said the health service was “committed to ensuring every penny of taxpayers’ money is spent wisely”.
Neil Carberry, of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), which represents companies supplying temporary staff, has said any ban on locum staff would be “a serious mistake”.
He added: ‘Agency workers are essential to maintaining safe staffing levels and ensuring services run smoothly.
‘These workers provide the flexibility the NHS desperately needs, with many choosing this route because it offers a better work-life balance.
“Removing this option would only put more pressure on an already under-resourced system and make staff shortages even worse as staff lose patience with poor NHS management.”
Cook Recruitment Group referred The Mail to the REC’s statement.
A spokesperson for ID Medical said its “healthcare workers have been instrumental in times of crisis to ensure patients receive the care they need.”
He added that the group worked within the price limits set by the Government and “has helped NHS trusts move away from agencies outside the high-cost framework”.
A spokesperson for Acacium Group said it offers “a valuable and flexible service that helps ensure safe staffing levels”.
He added: “We have a proven track record of delivering productivity improvements and cost savings across a number of major NHS trusts.”