To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many layers of management reporting from the most senior to the most junior there are in his Department and each of its agencies; how many officials are employed in each such layer; and how much was spent on salaries and associated employment costs of staff at each such layer in the latest year for which information is available. (312819)

The Department and its agencies use grading structures which do not necessarily exactly equate to management layers. Within the Department and its agencies there are 11 separate grades. Details of each grade, full-time equivalent staff, and annual pay bill costs for the core Department and its agencies are given in the following tables.

Core Department of Health

The following figures given are for equivalent numbers of full-time staff (FTE) and are a ‘snapshot’, reported to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as at 31 March 2009.

The staff figures have been published by ONS and can be found in the Civil Service Statistics 2009 (Table 11) on the following website:

www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=2899

The pay bill figures as follows are for the full financial year 2008-09 and the following table was also part of the Department's Resource Accounts for 2008-09.

The overall pay bill for each grade in the table includes: salary, employer's national insurance contribution, employer's superannuation contribution, non-consolidated performance-related payments, allowances and, where appropriate, overtime.

Please note that there are compositional differences between the two data sets presented above: ONS numbers provided for staff full-time equivalents (FTE) give the best measure of how many people work at the Department and at what level. Some individuals working within the Department are not on payroll, for example they are secondees in. The second table includes payroll costs of secondments and loans out (but not income associated with secondments out), whereas secondments and loans out are excluded in the ONS definitions for staff numbers. Additionally, payroll costs are for the whole year while ONS figures are snapshot.

Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

The following table has been produced by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency's (MHRA) finance division in accordance with the principles used to publish the MHRA's 2008-09 accounts.

NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency (PASA)