Education (Student Fees, Awards and Support)(Amendment) Regulations 2017

Debate between Lord Willetts and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean

Thursday 27th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I rise briefly as I realise that Members opposite are anxious to get away to campaign for their leader in the forthcoming general election. Thirty years ago, as a junior Minister responsible for health in the Scottish Office, I was asked to support something called Project 2000 and the move that all nurses should be graduates. As a junior Minister, I thought it was a rather silly idea. I could see that there might be a case for having some health professionals with degrees, but getting rid of the old state registered nurse system seemed to me a huge mistake.

However, the chief nurse was a particularly formidable person and my Secretary of State did not agree with me. Over the last 30 years, some people have argued that we needed people who would do not the less important—these are some of the most important tasks—but the more menial tasks, such as emptying bedpans, spending time with patients and providing the general care that was so much a part of the health service, and that you did not have to have a university degree to achieve that. I very much hope that the Government will think about that again. The noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, has almost got there—I do not mean that in a rude sense—in terms of offering a path forward which might address this problem, but I do not believe that everyone needs to be a graduate.

The reason that I interrupted the noble Lord to ask him how many of the people who applied to become nurses ended up doing a degree and becoming a nurse was because I knew the answer to my own question, which is that it is a small proportion. The noble Lord’s speech contained a number of very important points with which I agreed. We will have to train more nurses as a result of leaving the European Union. That is clearly important. We will have to train more nurses because of the demands upon the health service. However, it seems to me that what the Government are proposing in these regulations, which is to remove the cap and to provide the funding through a loans scheme, will provide for that and address the problem.

Whether the Government are prepared to consider the admirable suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, that there may be a case at a stage in a nurse’s career when they have served the health service for a longer period for forgiving the loans is another question. The Economic Affairs Committee has looked at the representations we have received on student loans and I would not be surprised if that did not represent a better deal for the taxpayer than continuing with the repayment where people are not receiving substantial salaries. So, while I think that the noble Lord has identified some real issues, I very much hope that noble Lords will not vote for this Motion, which would set us backwards and not provide the opportunity for more nurses to be trained and brought into our health service. I also hope that the Government will consider whether it is absolutely necessary for people to have university degrees in order to perform nursing duties in our health service.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, in the absence of a voice from the Opposition Benches I will briefly intervene in the debate. I declare an interest as a visiting professor at King’s College London, which has a major role in medical education through Guy’s and St Thomas’.

The noble Lord, Lord Clark, is of course right about the importance of nurses and about the lack of a suitable supply of nurses in the old regime. We heard a very constructive intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Clark, that nurses should not be worried about a model of fees and loans with graduate repayment. We went through all these concerns when we shifted mainstream higher education into fees and loans. In the first year, there was a decline in applications—but that stopped as soon as the students understood that they were not paying up front, and that it was a repayment scheme where they would pay back only if they started to earn more than £21,000 a year, and through PAYE. In other words, the so-called debt was nothing like a bank overdraft or a credit card debt; it was repayment through the income tax system if they were earning enough. That tackled their concerns, and since then we have seen an increase in the number of students applying to university.

My second point very much follows on from the excellent intervention of my noble friend Lord Forsyth. The reason we are short of nurses is that successive Governments have rationed the number of nurses. They have done that because nursing places have been financed out of public expenditure and the way to control public spending was to control the number of nurses. Back in 2004-05, we funded 25,000 nurse places a year. That has been in steady decline under successive Governments for a decade and is now down to around 17,000.

If we look at the evidence of what has happened in the past decade, there is no prospect under any Government of having more nurse places under the old system. A crucial part of these reforms is to remove the cap on places so that we will have more nurse places under the new system. The new system delivers more cash to cover nurses’ living costs during their nursing education. It delivers more money per nurse through the fees and loans system for universities providing nurse education and it removes the cap, thus providing the NHS with more trained nurses in total. That is a constructive reform of the NHS. It is progress on tackling the long-standing problems in nursing to which the noble Lord, Lord Clark, drew attention—and it is why I fear that this Motion is misconceived.