Nuffield Health grows annual income to £909m

30 Aug 2018 News

Nuffield Health, the largest trading charity in the UK, has grown its annual income by 8 per cent to over £909m, according to its latest accounts.

However, chief executive Steve Gray, the highest paid in the charity sector, saw his pay fall by £250,000 from 2016 to 2017 due to a reduction in bonuses.

According to the charity’s accounts to December 2017, the growth in income is an 8.3 per cent increase on the previous year, and is the latest in a series of large rises that have seen the charity grow by more than 50 per cent since the start of the decade.

Nuffield Health provides private hospitals, gyms, physiotherapy and other wellbeing services.

The charity said in its annual report that the rise in income over the past year was driven by record service users at its fitness and wellbeing clubs and an increase in the number of people that pay for treatments at its hospitals.

But it said it suffered declines in the value of work it received via the NHS and private medical insurance.

The charity made a deficit of £23.8m in 2017, compared to a £2.6m surplus in 2016, which it says is due to exceptional charges identified after it changed the way it calculates onerous leases and impairments and the costs it expect to incur in subsequent years.

Gray said in the report: “We also made some changes to the overall structure of the organisation. At the beginning of the year, we changed our operating structure to create better connections between the hospitals, clinical services and fitness and wellbeing clubs regionally.

“We then brought together Nuffield Health’s Customer Contact Centre and Employee Support Centre, into a central contact centre in Dorking, to ensure we could provide excellent service to customers and staff. We made further changes at head office, with the removal of some roles, to simplify our structures and reduce our costs.”

The charity said in its annual report that the number of people it helped grew by 21 per cent to 1.4 million.

CEO pay drops

The charity’s highest-paid member of staff, Gray, was paid between £510,000 and £520,000 for the year. This is substantially less than the £760,000 to £770,000 he was paid in 2016.

A spokeswoman for the charity said the reduction was due to Gray receiving less in bonus payments.

She said: "Our CEO’s total remuneration includes an annual bonus if he meets pre-defined business targets.

"In 2017, the organisation did not achieve all of its business targets, and so bonus payments were not made."

Meanwhile, the charity’s overall staff costs increased from £311.8m to £343.5m.

Its number of employees increased from 13,672 to 16,198 during 2017, which it said is due to its acquisition of 35 gyms from Virgin Active in August 2016.

Nuffield Health also pays its trustees, which it says are the same as directors under company law. In 2017, the charity spent £349,000 in emoluments paid to trustees, up from £256,000 in 2016.

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