The minister has said the health management structure could cost an extra £3.5m annually since the establishment of Manx Care.

Health Minister Lawrie Hooper explained in a House of Keys sitting last week that the overall departmental costs have ‘changed quite significantly’ since the introduction of the Manx Care Act, which brought in Manx Care and the redesign of the Department of Health and Social Care.

Prior to the split of Manx Care, the total staff budget expenditure for 2020-21 for the department was ‘just over £162 million’ and the full-time overall equivalent for the organisation in terms of staffing was 3,215.

‘The management structures of both the redesigned department and Manx Care were estimated as an additional cost annually of £3.5 million,’ Mr Hooper said in the sitting.

This was in response to a question posed by Douglas Central MHK Chris Thomas, who asked how the department’s payroll and budget has changed since the establishment of Manx Care and the Health and Care Transformation programme, and how it’s expected to change in the next three years.

Mr Hooper said: ‘The redesigned departmental budget staffing costs are £2.9 million for the current financial year and the forecast spend for the year is £2.3 million.

‘This represents a total of 30 staff in post as at January 2022, with the full establishment staffing of 37 full-time equivalent staff, excluding bank and board members.

‘The equivalent budget for the year 2020-21, being the year prior to Manx Care going live, was in the region of £2.6 million.’

The Pink Book Budget forecasts for the department are currently for 2022-23 a total of £3,028,646, and for 2023-24 a sum of £3,089,219.

Mr Hooper added that the next three years’s forecast for the payroll and budget are only expected to increase ‘subject to inflation’ and any ‘pay award budget allocation that will be derived from the Treasury’s medium-term financial strategy’.

He said: ‘The department will work as part of the routine annual budget process to review its workforce and operational budget needs, focused on delivering its statutory functions and the development of policies to inform both the mandate and its legislative programme.’

Mr Thomas mentioned that the Department of Home Affairs manages three entities, whereas the Department of Health and Social Care ‘manages one’ which the minister described as a ‘lack of understanding’.

‘Approximately half the members of staff in the department work for the registration and inspection team,’ he said. ‘That is approximately half of the department’s staff.

‘Additionally we have to undertake assurance around the mandate functions, which is essentially the whole health and social care system – which has staffing costs itself of around £160 million and nearly 3,000 staff, which I would argue is substantially higher than the Department of Home Affairs.’

Mr Thomas asked the minister to confirm if he is responsible for ‘hundreds of millions of pounds of expenditure’ within Manx Care.

Mr Hooper declined to comment on that matter, stating the question was about the department, not Manx Care.