Reforms to hospital consultants’ pay are saving the government up to £600,000 a year.

Health Minister David Ashford revealed the figure in an email to Tynwald members, sent after the issue was raised in the court last week.

Mr Ashford said that ’job planning’ was ongoing, but that so far the savings realised were £600,000 per annum.

The issue was brought up by Juan Watterson (Rushen) in Tynwald, when he sought an update on the review of consultants’ pay - brought about after it was revealed that some consultants at Noble’s Hospital earned far more than their NHS England counterparts, sometimes up to 75% more.

Mr Ashford said: ’A detailed job-planning framework has been developed and is in the final stages of negotiation, with only the arrangements pertaining to private practice to be finally agreed upon.

’When fully implemented, this will align organisational objectives with consultant activity and result in equitable, fair and transparent remuneration. It will also provide clear and transparent arrangements in regard to private practice.’

The arrangements would be in place by the end of the financial year, he said.

But Mr Watterson said the ’anomalies’ in consultants’ pay had been known about since November 2017. He asked Mr Ashford if he was satisfied with the timescale.

The minister said changes to consultants’ pay had to be negotiated and ’we need to ensure that we are competitive in the consultant market’.

He said the inconsistencies in pay related to ’certain consultants’, adding: ’I need to make clear again that it is not all 55 consultants, it was a small cohort - and a lot of those individual cases, I believe, have already been tackled in relation to their performance activity, because that is how their pay is broken down.’