NHS Workforce Expansion

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I will make a bit of progress, so that there is the opportunity for Back Benchers to speak.

We have heard and will no doubt continue to hear about how we have been in power for 13 years so far, so it is only right to look at some of the figures since 2010. Since 2010, we have 35,000 more hospital doctors and 46,000 more nurses and health visitors, not to mention a nearly 50% increase in medical consultants and a near 60% increase in paramedics. That is what we have done.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. In addition to the excellent point she made about the absence of social care in the motion, does she agree that the figures the Opposition have chosen to use in the motion do not give the whole picture at all? They do not include vacancies filled by bank staff, very often from the same hospital.

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point about the selective use of figures by Opposition Members.

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[Helen Whately]

I know that the hon. Gentleman feels very strongly about the issue; we have talked about radiotherapy. He will know that we have invested more than £160 million in improving radiotherapy equipment. This year, we are investing an extra £50 million in the cancer and diagnosis workforce. We are continuing to work hard with the NHS on reducing the backlogs that we have seen since the pandemic, when people did not come forward for cancer treatment as they would have in normal times.

[Aaron Bell]

The Minister mentioned non-dom status under the previous Labour Government, and what they said about it. Is she aware that Alistair Darling said that

“such a charge could discourage men and women—doctors and nurses, business men and women—from coming to this country…and we do not want to turn them away”?—[Official Report, 9 October 2007; Vol. 464, c. 171.]

Gordon Brown considered a five-year cap and abandoned it. Ed Balls said that it would end up “costing Britain money”. The supposed heir to Blair is sitting at the Opposition Dispatch Box, opposite the Minister. Is it not surprising that he has not learned more lessons from new Labour?

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. We hear about this source of funding again and again—we hear that non-doms will provide all this money—but plenty of the shadow Health Secretary’s predecessors in Labour have said that they do not think the policy he suggests would generate any more income whatsoever.

It will imminently be time to give Back Benchers an opportunity to speak, so let me end by saying that it has been an honour to open this debate on behalf of the Government and to respond to the array of misrepresentations from Labour Front Benchers. The NHS exists to care for patients, and they should always be our first priority, but the NHS’s greatest asset is its workforce.

From a lifetime of talking to staff, I know that what they want is to care for patients in a way they feel proud of. They can do that only if they themselves are cared for, feel valued, are looked after and have enough colleagues to support them. The Government are working flat out on every one of those areas. We are hiring more staff, harnessing new technology, joining up health and social care, and building bridges between parts of the system like never before. I know how tough it has been and, on too many days, how tough it still is on the frontline. I am determined that we will continue to do what is right by health and social care staff, for them and for the people they look after.

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[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to catch your eye a little earlier than I did yesterday evening.

I welcome the speech from the SNP Front Bench. It is good to see Scotland is having its say in this debate. I disagree with a lot of what the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) said, but it is good to see that she is standing up for her Government. At the start of this debate, there were no Welsh Labour MPs in here at all. I see that a couple have popped in now. It is interesting, given what Labour claims it is going to do for the NHS in England, that no Welsh Labour MPs have put in to speak in this debate to defend their record in Wales.

I also note that the hon. Lady, in praising how things work in Scotland, did not refer to the recent report by Audit Scotland that said that the plans to hire GPs in Scotland were not on track, the target for more mental health staff was at risk and the number of operations was still 25% below pre-pandemic levels. It was described as an ever-increasing crisis in the Scottish NHS, with the double whammy of nursing vacancies going up at the same time as staff are leaving, yet the man responsible for the NHS in Scotland, Humza Yousaf, is standing to be the next leader of the SNP. Wikipedia does not inform me as to the hon. Lady’s preference in that election—perhaps she has not endorsed anybody yet—but I find it extraordinary that the man responsible for presiding over the state of the NHS in Scotland is putting himself forward to be the next leader of the SNP. It is an astonishing succession failure from Nicola Sturgeon to have such a weak field vying to be First Minister of Scotland, which is a very important job. But as I say, I respect the fact that the hon. Lady is here standing up for what she believes in and standing up for her Government in Holyrood.

Turning to the motion, as I said in my intervention on the Minister—I congratulate her on her speech—I reject some of the premises of the motion and some of the statistics involved. It is pretty rich to be lectured by the Opposition, given the backlogs they left in 2010 when they had no covid to contend with. There is no mention of covid in the motion. They left a 20,000 backlog in elective surgery that successive Governments got down to 1,000—a 95% fall—before the pandemic. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) does not think the pandemic is relevant in the context of backlogs, I don’t know what to tell him. Under the Labour Government there was also a lack of productivity growth in the NHS—it was at less than 1% a year—which we have got back up to 1.7% since 2010. The hon. Gentleman spoke about IT, and I agree with him on that—I used to work in IT—but the Labour Government wasted £12.8 billion on IT for the NHS, which was a complete disaster and exposed as such by the Audit Commission.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I do not quite understand this backlog the hon. Gentleman is talking about. I remember when it took three years for somebody to get a knee replacement or a hip replacement. Under the Labour Government it took six to eight weeks. Not 68 weeks; six to eight weeks. Across all elective surgery, we put those lists well and truly through the floor. Surely he can acknowledge that.

[Aaron Bell]

When Labour left office, more than 20,000 people were waiting over a year for elective treatment. Before the pandemic—this was not acknowledged properly—the number of people waiting more than 52 weeks for elective treatment had fallen by 95% in England, to just over 1,000. Those are the statistics. The hon. Gentleman can argue with them if he likes, but they are there in black and white.

As I said, it is interesting to see the lack of contrition about the state of the NHS in Wales, which is a complete mess. I will refer to that in detail later, but only yesterday the NHS Board in North Wales was put into special measures for a second time. I accept that there are challenges everywhere—in Scotland, Wales and England. Indeed, if we look at the comparisons across the continent, we can see that these challenges are international in nature, because everybody is recovering from covid, but I believe that this Government are tackling the challenges, and the workforce challenges, head on.

[Ashley Dalton (West Lancashire) (Lab)]

I am really glad that you have consistently raised the issue of covid. Could you suggest why it is that services such as the overnight children’s A&E at Southport and Ormskirk Hospital in my constituency, which was closed, allegedly due to covid restrictions, still remains closed to this day?

[Ashley Dalton]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Aaron Bell]

I welcome the hon. Lady to her place and congratulate her on her recent election. I believe that her predecessor, Rosie Cooper, is now responsible for the issue that she has just raised, so perhaps she will have some luck if she speaks to her about that—[Interruption.] Have I got that wrong? I do apologise. By the way, I would like to pay tribute to Rosie Cooper, because I did not have the chance to do so when she left. She handled herself with great dignity in the face of some very unacceptable circumstances, and I pay tribute to her. I see several by-election victors on the Opposition Benches and I congratulate them all. I cannot speak exactly to the hon. Lady’s NHS trust. I am sure that if she writes the Minister or speaks to the NHS trust directly, she might get some answers as to what is going on in Southport, but if she will forgive me, I represent North Staffordshire.

Before I detail the work that the Government are doing, I would like to praise the work of everybody in the NHS—as the Opposition Front Benchers did—and particularly those in North Staffordshire who working in our hospitals and GP surgeries, our health visitors and clinical staff, and those who support those people. It has been a difficult winter—after a difficult few years—with covid and flu peaking simultaneously in December. I am pleased to report that the most recent figures from the integrated care board for Stoke and Staffordshire show that ambulance handovers hugely improved in February, compared with where they were in January, which was unacceptable, as I said in the House at the time. There has been an 8% increase in primary care appointments, compared with a year ago, with 73% delivered face to face—higher than the national average—and waiting times for surgery are falling, including for cancer treatment at the Royal Stoke Hospital. I pay tribute to everybody working at the coalface in the NHS, because I know what difficult work it is and we are all extremely grateful.

Turning to NHS workforce expansion, this Conservative Government are strengthening the NHS workforce. In hospitals we have 5,000 more doctors and 10,500 more nurses compared with October 2021. Compared with 2010, when the last Labour Government left office, we have 37,000 more doctors and 45,000 more nurses in our hospitals. We are also building up the workforce in primary care, recruiting 26,000 more primary care staff by March 2024—a target that is on track, unlike the target in Scotland. In Newcastle-under-Lyme, the number of doctors, nurses and other clinical staff based in GP surgeries has increased by 46% since September 2019. That is 55 additional full-time equivalent people. So we are seeing a growth in Newcastle-under-Lyme as well.

Workforce expansion is also about retention, as the Minister said. Times are tough for everybody, given what Putin’s war in Ukraine has done to inflation, but we have always prioritised NHS workers, especially those earning the least. A million workers received at least an additional £1,400 in their pay packets in the last year, and we accepted the independent pay review in full. During covid in 2021, we protected healthcare workers, giving them a pay rise during a wider public sector pay freeze and when private sector wages were falling. The full-time basic salary of a newly qualified junior nurse at the bottom of band 5 is now over £27,000, and experienced nurses or midwives at the top of band 6 are earning £40,588. On top of that, they get excellent pension provision, so we are looking after our NHS staff by paying them and retaining them.

More generally, we are also increasing the number of beds across the hospital estate. A new ward with 28 beds recently opened at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, but I know Tracy Bullock wants more, and I will speak to the Minister about that. We will need more beds for next winter, because the Royal Stoke is under incredible pressure, not least because of the burden of the New Labour private finance initiative contract that costs them a fortune to maintain. A previous Health Secretary ranked the worst 10 PFI contracts, and I believe that we were 11th or 12th at the time. The hospital has to live with that burden, and I raise it again with the Minister today; we want what went wrong before to be put right.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will not mind my encouraging the Minister to look, in addition to the case for more investment in his local hospital, at investing more in Northwick Park Hospital, which serves my constituents. It needs a 60-bed intensive care unit to improve the quality of critical care and, crucially, to help attract more critical care nurses and other medical staff.

[Aaron Bell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point; I am sure the Minister has heard it. I will not say any more about that specific case, because I do not know his constituency that well—although I did work in Harrow once upon a time.

We had 120,000 more GP appointments every day in January ’23 compared with January ’22, and we are delivering the biggest ever catch-up—it is a necessary catch-up—over the next three years, with an extra £45.6 billion in funding to help us recover from covid. That will mean 9 million more scans, 9 million more checks and 9 million more procedures for the people who need them.

We know what Labour would do. It claims to have a plan funded through non-dom status, but I doubt that would raise the money, not only for the reasons I gave in the Opposition day debate at the end of January, but because it has already committed that money to breakfast clubs and various other things. There is a never-ending magic money tree that pays for all Labour’s commitments —[Interruption.] I know that the shadow Health Secretary and others have made many unfunded spending commitments. Labour’s answer is always more money, and the answer to how that will be funded is always a non-dom tax, which would not even raise the money Labour claims, as Ed Balls said, as Alastair Darling said, and as Gordon Brown found out for himself.

[Andrew Western (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Aaron Bell]

No, I have already spoken for 11 minutes, so I must get to the end—I have heard your strictures, Mr Deputy Speaker.

The NHS in Labour-run Wales has a shocking record of failure. As I said earlier, the health board in north Wales is once again under special measures. Since 2009, the Welsh Labour Government have consistently failed to meet the 95% four-hour target. England and Scotland, as the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire said, do a lot better on that measure. Patients in Wales are twice as likely to wait for hospital treatment, with 21.3% waiting after a referral by a consultant compared with only 12.8% in England. Perhaps the shadow Minister will explain, when summing up, whether he approves of Labour’s record in running the NHS in Wales or condemns it, as we do.

We also know about Labour’s record in government here in Westminster. As I said earlier, the elective surgery figure is a fact. Instead, we are investing record sums in our NHS. We are investing in its buildings and equipment but most of all in its staff. Having delivered for this country throughout covid, having vaccinated us and got us out of lockdown—which I recall the shadow Health Secretary opposing before Christmas 2021—and back to work, we are now helping the NHS to recover. I am proud to support this Government.

[Several hon. Members rose—]