BBC Social Affairs Editor Niall DIckson reports on the reforms

The managers will receive as much as £50,000 each to run new primary care groups throughout England.

A health circular which has been obtained by BBC News also reveals that the chairmen and women of the groups would receive up to £21,000.

The managers will run what are known as primary care groups - which will monitor General Practitioner (GP) services while commissioning hospital and community services for patients in England.

The BBC's Niall Dickson: The NHS needs managers

The groups are meant to play a key role in replacing GP fundholding.

When Labour came to power it promised to slash NHS bureaucracy by abolishing the internal market and the GP fundholding scheme.

'Further costs'

The aim is that the new system will not exceed the cost of the old fundholding system.

That may be achieved in the first year, but as the schemes develop, there will be further costs.

BBC Social Affairs Editor Niall Dickson said: "The truth is you can't run a very complex organisation like the health service without managers.

"It's very easy for politicians of all kinds to be very rude about managers and bureaucracy, but you need managers and you do need to be able to pay people who are controlling very large budgets - up to £100m - quite a bit."

Roy Lilley and John Chisholm discuss the cost to the NHS

Roy Lilley, a former NHS trust chief executive and an architect of the Conservative Government reforms, which created an internal market in the NHS, accused the government of creating an expensive new bureaucracy.

He said: "The government's intention is that the new arrangements will be contained within the "existing managerial cost envelope."

"But it looks to me as though this is going to be a much more expensive exercise."