Millions of pounds have been paid to dead NHS staff as part of their pensions, a Freedom of Information request has revealed. 

The Telegraph report: 

Over the past decade, the health service has made such payments on more than 70,000 occasions, after its systems did not detect that former workers had died, new figures show.

Experts said many of the payments – enough to pay the wages of nearly 1,500 nurses – continued to be paid either because pensioners had moved abroad, or because of fraud on the part of their relatives.

The figures provided by the NHS under Freedom of Information disclosures show £4.1m was overpaid in 2012/13 – nearly double the amount overpaid in 2003/4.

You can read the full story here. 

I am a journalist and author. I am a journalist at the UK edition of WIRED magazine. In 2015, my first book Freedom of Information: A Practical Guide for UK Journalists, was published. My second book Reed Hastings: Building Netflix, was published in March 2020. I created FOI Directory in 2012 and have maintained it in my spare time ever since.