At least £1.4 billion of the NHS budget was spent on redundancy payments since the coalition came to power, the Labour Party has claimed.
The figures are based on NHS England’s accounts for 2012/13, which were released last week.
Andy Burnham, shadow health secretary said it amounts to “waste on a colossal scale”.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 live, he said that the redundancies were the result of an NHS restructuring that “no-one wanted and nobody voted for”.
However, care and support minister Norman Lamb said the government was slimming down the “over-bloated bureaucracy Labour created”.
Burnham said the NHS’ accounts showed there had been a total of 32,000 pay-offs since the coalition government was formed in 2010.
The latest figures showed more than 950 health workers received six-figure redundancy packages last year, up from around 620 in 2011-12, he added.
