One-in-five redundant NHS staff rehired Of those, 3,261 of have since been rehired by the NHS - the vast majority in the past 12 months, MPs heard. They include 403 employees who were back working for the health service within four weeks of taking redundancy, the disclosures reveal. Barbara Keeley, Labour MP, accused ministers and health officials of "appallingly bad planning .. it just smacks of carelessness with public money." "This is the use of public money; pay offs and redundancies, people taking pensions from the public purse and then being re-employed; effectively being paid twice," she said. The changes introduced in April have seen 150 primary care trusts, run by managers, replaced with 211 clinical commissioning groups, led by family doctors. David Nicholson, NHS chief executive, said he did not have the power to stop NHS bodies from re-employing those who had been made redundant, but said his own organisation NHS England, had taken steps not to re-hire those who had been given pay-offs. He said the NHS had spent far less than it had anticipated on redundancies, with around £600 million to £700 million spent, instead of a forecast £1.5bn. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, said: "The NHS is 1.3 million people strong and successive governments - not just this government have concluded that it doesn't work to run it as a single structure with everyone reporting to the secretary of state." He said steps had been taken to claw back pay in future from those who went on to work for Government agencies after receiving redundancy deals. Karen Straughair, 50, who was chief executive of NHS South of Tyne and Wear, was paid £605,000 when the trust was abolished in March. Her husband Chris Reed, 57, who was chief executive of NHS North of Tyne, also got a redundancy payout of £345,000 when his organisation was abolished in the same month. Both then went on to work for several months for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust in June, where he took the role of interim chief executive and she was employed as the recovery director. Previously released figures analysing 10,000 of the redundancies disclose that 330 of the staff received exit packages of £200,000 or more, while 513 were paid between £150,000 and £200,000 and 1,456 were given between £100,000 and £150,000 in redundancy payments. Mr Hunt was also questioned by MPs about plans for next year's pay deal for NHS staff. He said that a 1 per cent rise for staff would be unaffordable - and would equate to an extra 10,000 frontline posts - if action was not taken to phase out a system of "incremental" pay rises which most staff receive in addition. He said: "The commitment we made for a 1 per cent rise was not regardless of any other increments that you might get in the pay packet ... that can mean an automatic rise of as much as six or seven per cent." Dr Dan Poulter, Health Minister, said: "These one-off redundancy bills were a direct result of the last government's ridiculously lax rules negotiated in 2006, which frustratingly left the NHS with excessive liabilities when we dismantled Labour's bloated management bureaucracy and put doctors in charge. We have overhauled their system with tough new rules that will make sure this can never happen again.