ALMOST £30m has been spent on laying off health managers across the region, figures show – only for many to be rehired for the Government’s NHS shake-up.

A total of 478 staff were handed “exit packages” totalling £28.52m last year in the North-East and North Yorkshire, receiving an average payout of about £60,000.

Half received more than £40,000 each to quit doomed primary care trusts (PCTs) – including one manager, in Gateshead, who received £163,000.

Yet many of the staff are expected to be rehired for the new GP-led “clinical commissioning groups” (CCGs) that are controversially replacing PCTs .

Last night, the Royal College of Nursing, which uncovered the statistics, described them as “nothing short of scandalous”.

It said the £28.52m bill was equivalent to the cost of many more than 1,000 nurses – at a time when health trusts in the North-East have lost 513 nurses and midwives in only 12 months.

And Phil Wilson, Labour MP for Sedgefield, described the payouts as “bureaucracy gone mad” – flying in the face of Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s vow to reduce administrative costs.

He said: “Many of those made redundant are being re-employed by the new commissioning consortia, only weeks after receiving massive payouts.

“The Government talks about reducing bureaucracy, but all it is doing is replacing one bureaucracy with another.

It is bureaucracy gone mad.”

The bill in County Durham (£5.75m) was the second highest in England after Camden, in London (£6.3m) and three other North-East trusts – Stockton (£3.42m), Middlesbrough (£3.32m) and Sunderland (£3.26m) – were in the top ten.

Across England, the redundancy bill in 2010-11 reached £168m. One employee received £235,000, the Department of Health (DoH) revealed.

The figures were released as Labour secured an emergency debate today to try to prevent the passing of the Health Bill without the DoH releasing a secret internal “risk register”.

However, the legislation is expected to achieve Royal Assent this week, after a lastgasp attempt to derail it in the Lords failed yesterday by 328 votes to 213.

The full cost of redundancy payouts across the NHS is expected to reach £1bn, after the scrapping of strategic health authorities as well as PCTs.

But Simon Burns, a Conservative health minister, said: “The short-term costs are dwarfed by the £4.5bn that we will save over the course of this parliament and £1.5bn every year after that.

“Our planned cost for NHS reform remains the same as what we published in the impact assessment in September.”

But Mr Wilson urged Mr Lansley to explore how to transfer NHS staff without huge redundancy payments, to prevent the shake-up “hitting front line services”.

Some CCGs are expected to recruit departing PCT staff because of their expertise in commissioning care – although others are turning to private health firms to perform the task.