Spending on so-called “golden goodbyes” and voluntary redundancy deals has shot up to £39 million a year at the Department of Health (DoH) - an eightfold increase on the previous year - official figures reveal.

A written parliamentary answer shows that more than 500 staff who left the DoH in 2016-17 because of restructuring and cost-cutting programmes received exit packages. In 2015-16, only nine people who were laid off from the department were given such settlements.

The figure of £39 million covers the whole of the department and its agencies and compares with a spend of £5 million for the previous year.

Health minister Philip Dunne said “voluntary exits” of DoH staff accounted for £31,568,000 of the total spend in a paper published this week. This was shared between 557 employees, meaning each received an average redundancy settlement of £54,710.

An additional £1.4 million was spent on compulsory redundancies, the Health Service Journal reported.

Across the entire NHS, including the DoH, £153 million was spent on redundancies and “exit packages”, up from £141 million the previous year.

The remaining £6.6 million is thought to have been given to those taking voluntary redundancy at agencies including Public Health England, after sweeping staff cuts.

Ministers were criticised in March after revealing that 340 civil servants were to be recruited for the DoH, despite the mass redundancies, largely to respond to the administrative demands of Brexit.

Almost £2 billion had already been spent on NHS redundancies since 2010. In 2015, the Government vowed to crack down on the widely condemned practice of issuing six figure pay-offs to senior public sector managers – but although the majority of the exit packages received are now more modest, the sheer number of redundancies has caused the overall figure for the DoH to rise sharply.

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In spite of the Conservative pledge to end large pay-offs, more than 1,000 civil servants and senior NHS officials were awarded exit payments of more than £100,000, with 165 receiving at least £200,000, according to official statistics released earlier this year.

There was anger when separate figures this year revealed more than 600 NHS quango bosses rake in six-figure salaries at a time when public sector workers including nurses are on a one per cent annual pay rise cap.

Since 2010 when the coalition government pledged to reduce spending on NHS bureaucracy, almost £2 billion has been being spent on redundancies due to restructuring.