NHS spending on agency nurses and staff has spiralled to more than £5.5bn over the past four years and is continuing to rise amid a debilitating recruitment crisis in the health service. Budgets for temporary staff this financial year have already been blown apart, it can be revealed, with spending in some parts of the NHS running at twice the planned figure.

Reliance on agencies – at a cost of up to £1,800 per day per nurse – comes as the number of nurse training places in England has been cut. In the last year of the Labour government, 20,829 nurse training positions were filled in England. That fell to 17,741 in 2011-12 and to 17,219 in 2012-13, rising to 18,009 in 2013-14.

According to the latest figures, there were 7,000 fewer qualified nurses in August 2013 compared with May 2010, excluding health visitors, school nurses and midwives. Ministers were accused on Saturday of “truly incompetent planning” by the Royal College of Nurses.

Many of the agency nurses filling the gaps are from abroad, which means their home countries are robbed of medical expertise. Last year 6,228 foreign nurses registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council, 22% of the total number of new nurses qualified to work. This compares with 4,305 the previous year.

Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “These spending figures beggar belief and are the result of truly incompetent workforce planning. Nursing staff are sometimes seen as an easy target for cost savings, only for the NHS to find itself dangerously short- staffed and having to plug the gap. This means individual hospitals and the NHS as a whole are spending too much on agency staff and recruitment from overseas.”

New figures released by the government following a parliamentary question show that NHS Foundation Trusts spent £4.3bn between 2010-11 and 2013-14 on agency and temporary staff. Other NHS Trusts spent £1.2bn in 2013/2014, but figures were not available for these trusts over the previous years, meaning the total bill for the last four years could be closer to £10bn.The figures show that, despite repeated pledges to cut spending on this, the cost to NHS foundation trusts has gone up by around 20% for each of the four financial years of the coalition government. In the last year of the Labour government, NHS foundation trusts spent £734m. In 2013-14 that had doubled to £1.3bn.

Trusts are now facing what Monitor, the NHS regulator, calls “unprecedented financial pressure” due to their reliance on expensive agency staff.

The most recent quarterly report from the regulator warned that the current spending on agencies was unsustainable. It said: “Foundation trusts continue to experience difficulties in recruiting and retaining permanent staff. Given the growth in demand … a planned year-on-year reduction in agency staff usage has not materialised. Instead, spend on contract and agency staff is double the planned figure. In the medium to long term, this level of spend on temporary staff cannot be sustained.”

The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, said that under Labour’s plans, an additional 20,000 nurses would be recruited by 2020: “The soaring bill for agency staff, now bleeding the NHS dry, is a direct consequence of David Cameron’s disastrous NHS reorganisation.

“The dismantling of NHS workforce planning and training structures has created a shortage of staff and left the NHS with a whopping bill for agency staff. This is draining NHS finances and damaging standards of patient care.

“In parts of the NHS, spending on agency staff has doubled under David Cameron. Cameron’s mismanagement of the NHS has trapped hospitals in a downward spiral. The NHS now urgently needs a change of course and a change of government. The Tories have shown once again that they just can’t be trusted with the NHS.”

A Department of Health spokesperson said that responding to the Francis inquiry into poor care at Mid Staffs NHS Trust, which called for increasing staffing on wards, had forced the NHS to rely on agencies and temporary workers.

He said: “In the wake of Mid Staffs, there has been some increased spend on agency staff to correct historic understaffing, but we now have 13,500 more clinicians since May 2010 and are reducing reliance on expensive agency workers – because delivering safe care and balancing the books go hand in hand.”