The NHS is spending too much money paying staff who have been suspended from work, a committee of MPs has said.

With the annual bill reaching around £40 million, the public accounts committee said that too many cases were allowed to "drag on and on".

The report, published on Tuesday, revealed that the average length of exclusion from work for suspended doctors was 47 weeks, and 19 weeks for other clinical staff.

And committee chairman Edward Leigh said he was "astonished" to learn that in 30 cases the suspensions had lasted over two years.

If all suspensions were resolved with in the six month target time savings of some £14 million a year could be realised, the report said.

Leigh warned that the annual cost was "much too high" and could be damaging to the clinicians involved.

"They face depression, erosion of skills and lasting career problems even if totally exonerated," he said.

"The Department of Health and the NHS as a whole need to get a much better grip on the management of all exclusions of clinical staff and resolve cases within at least the existing six month target."

The report said that between April 2001 and July 2002 over 1,000 clinical staff at NHS hospital and ambulance trusts in England were excluded from work for more than a month.

And apart from the loss of staff resources caused by such suspensions, "substantial retraining" can also be required before the doctors or nurses can return to work.

The committee was critical of the decade it had taken the Department of Health to introduce new guidelines on staff suspensions.

"The department's new guidance finally issued in December 2003 is welcome but it has taken 10 years to produce and is incomplete, as it only applies to doctors, not other clinical staff," said the committee.