THE new boss of James Cook and the Friarage hospitals will receive the same £225,000-a-year salary as her predecessor, NHS officials have confirmed.

Siobhan McArdle became the chief executive of South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in October, taking over the top job from Tricia Hart who will leave the trust in January.

Professor Hart was at the centre of a row over public sector wages earlier this year after the Taxpayers Alliance and Daily Mail claimed she received a package of £1.29m package last year - a figure the trust strongly rejected saying researchers had made a mistake.

The trust is currently mid-way through a major cost-cutting exercise to save £91 million over three years, with the organisation reporting a deficit of £7.1 million at the end of 2014/15.

The trust's 2014/15 annual report confirmed that health watchdog Monitor rated the trust poorly for both governance and continuity of service.

In light of the financial pressures faced by the trust, Unison regional organiser Mark Clifford described the chief executive's salary as "disgraceful".

He added: "It comes at a time when the trust is embarking on a workforce review.

"Elsewhere in the trust there are potentially going to be redundancies and people are going to be paid off and people will see their bands downgraded.

"But at the top there's almost an attitude of 'I'm alright Jack'."

Details of the chief executive's pay emerged as the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) highlighted new research that showed the "dramatic" fall in the real terms earnings of nursing staff in recent years.

RCN Northern said the role of chief executive was notoriously difficult one to recruit to, but so was recruiting nurses who had seen their earnings fall by 9.6 per cent since 2008.

"We would urge the Government to recognise that they need to invest properly in workforces to get the best outcomes,”

South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said the salary for the current CEO Siobhan McArdle would remain as set in 2013.

A spokesman added: “In 2012, in seeking a replacement for the previous CEO, we carried out an in-depth benchmarking exercise against other similar organisations and decided to increase the basic salary to help attract the best candidate to lead the organisation through difficult times.

“Even with this increase, we still pay less than many other large acute trusts, as well as some much smaller trusts in the North-East."

The trust added that it had delivered on its "cost improvement programme" with other NHS trusts visiting South Tees to see it was improving without compromising the quality of services.

According to the RCN, the average remuneration of an NHS CEO in the North-East and Cumbria is now over £200,000 a year.