NHS Bursaries

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow on from the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), who made a thoughtful speech and highlighted an important point about the different study load of those training to be nurses, compared with some of us when we were at university. I do not think that that invalidates the Government’s proposals, but it is an important point to take into account.

Like the hon. Gentleman, I congratulate the Opposition spokesman on calling the debate, which has been an important one, and I congratulate the Minister on a characteristically thoughtful, reasonable and lucid response to it. I cannot help observing that the debate demonstrates the value of having people in this House who come from genuine professions, rather than having reached here purely as a result of being political professionals. There has been considerable input from those who have studied, worked or been in the national health service.

Although it is an Opposition debate, there are some points that we can all agree on. First, we should agree that we need to recruit, train and retain enough nurses to staff our health service to meet the needs of the British people. Secondly, we can agree that it is wrong—morally wrong—to rely on recruiting nurses from poor countries, who have had to bear the cost of their training, to meet our failure to train enough nurses ourselves. Thirdly, we should not be turning away British people who want to train as nurses when we need more nurses. Surely all of us can agree on those three points. We can debate how best we finance the recruitment, retention and motivation of sufficient nurses in this country, but we should all agree that that is the objective.

My initial interest in this topic came a couple of decades ago and resulted from my first career as a development economist working in Africa and Asia. I discovered while I was in the House that we were denuding Africa of nurses. We had recruited more than one in eight of all the nurses in sub-Saharan Africa and brought them to this country. That could not be right. I lobbied against it and the then Prime Minister promised that there would be no active recruitment from Africa, but seven years later I discovered that we had recruited another 60,000 nurses. We were continuing to recruit at several thousand a year, but we were promised that that would cease.

What I blame myself for is that it took me so long to realise that the problem did not lie so much in recruiting from Africa and other poor parts of the world as in our failure in this country to train enough nurses of our own. I did not ask why we were not doing so until I was talking to people in my local NHS, who told me that they were recruiting abroad, mainly in southern Europe but also in Asia, and they were doing so despite the fact that they would have preferred to recruit and employ nurses from the University of Hertfordshire, whom they described as excellent, well trained and in every way desirable. I asked why they did not recruit more, but they said that they could not recruit enough. Even if they recruited the next several years’ worth of output, that would not meet the needs of Hertfordshire’s health service, which is why they were recruiting abroad.

[Dr Lisa Cameron]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is ironic that through our international aid programmes we are assisting developing countries to pay for trainee placements in clinical establishments such as hospitals abroad, yet we do not afford the same rights to our NHS trainees here?

[Mr Lilley]

It is certainly bizarre that we pay African countries to train nurses and promptly recruit them to come here, so we are getting them cheaply trained abroad. I do not mind particularly the manner in which their training is financed.

The problem faced by my local NHS was that it could not get enough nurses from the University of Hertfordshire. I spoke to the University of Hertfordshire, which said that there was no lack of applicants—it turned away three quarters of applicants to its highly regarded nursing courses—but it was not allowed to expand. It had taken me decades in this House to realise that we had a system that limited the number of people we were recruiting. I duly lobbied the Government, and it may be because of my lobbying that we now have this proposal for bursaries, though I suspect the Government reached the decision on their own evidence.

The sad truth is that successive Ministers of all parties—we should recognise that—have bucked the question of how we train enough people in this country. Ministers tend to have a time horizon of roughly the time it takes to train a nurse, so why put up with diverting resources into training when the output of extra nurses will come after they have ceased to be Health Ministers? I am glad that this Secretary of State for Health and his fellow Ministers have addressed the question. However, we should recognise that it is symptomatic of a wider problem across British business in both the private and the public sector that we have a culture that does not put enough emphasis on training. It is particularly bizarre that we allow unlimited numbers of people in universities to study art history and media studies—very valuable subjects—but restrict the numbers who can train to be nurses, when we know we have a crying and desperate need for more.

I am agnostic about the best way to finance the training of more nursing recruits. Clearly, if nurses bear the extra cost, that will have to be reflected in some way in their remuneration. The Minister told us that they will actually be no worse off, so I suppose the assumption is that they will not have to repay much of their loans. It is a somewhat artificial feature of the public finance rules, but it is a feature of them, that perhaps the only way of not borrowing the money from the public ourselves is for the nurses to borrow it and for us then to write off their loans. However, whatever the financial system—the end of bursaries and their replacement with loans is probably the only option—we have to pay nurses enough in the long run to recruit, retain and motivate them.

There is one other issue we should look at before we close the debate. There are 200,000 trained nurses who maintain themselves on the register at their own expense, but who are not currently working in the NHS or elsewhere—they may be taking time off to raise a family, and they may be thinking about coming back some time. We must be much more flexible and creative about providing patterns of work that meet the family needs of those trained, valuable, caring and experienced people if we are to bring them back into the health service. That, too, will help to meet the needs of the health service, as the Government are trying to, sensibly and wisely, in the measures they have brought before us to replace bursaries with loans.