Nurses: Tuition Fees

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

My noble friend is quite right to point out that student debt is forgiven after 30 years. The point of that is to ensure there is an equitable system, where those who earn more pay back more over the course of their working lives. It is important to point out that, with the new threshold moving up to £25,000, a nurse earning £26,000 in band 5 of the Agenda for Change pay scale would pay back £7.50 of that loan per calendar month.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, with the NHS reporting that 96% of hospitals are currently failing to meet their planned number of registered nurses, and UCAS reporting a decline in student nurse applications, as the noble Lord mentioned, as well as the further news that one in four post-qualifying nurses leave in their first year, what are the Government proposing to do to change the problem of recruiting new nurses, including returning to bursaries and abolishing tuition fees altogether? Specifically, what are the Government doing right now to attract nurses into our hospitals?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

It is important to point out that there are 10,000 more nurses on wards than there were seven years ago. One of the things that we are trying to do is encourage nurses to return to practice—3,000 of those nurses have been on the return to practice programme. In regard to attracting them to hospitals, the main thing is that we need to train more nurses to fill those places so that we fill the demand that we know that we have from a growing and ageing population. That is why there are going to be 5,000 more funded nursing training places from 2018 onwards.