@cstross It would interesting to know if this policy is mostly due to the Dept of Health, or to groupthink in Trust HR depts.

There must be some way of taking that budget, cutting out all the third party middlemen, spending it directly on significantly better staff basic rates, while including paid incentives for staff to basically work more hours until more staff can be recruited to take the pressure off.

Tl;dr Invest in and retain staff, not piss it away on rentiers