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

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, this is a terrible time for the Government to undertake a highly risky revision of the funding of student nurses. We are already short of nurses, as the noble Lord, Lord Clark, told us, and of course midwives, and the imminent Brexit has already made that worse with, as we have heard, a 90% drop in the number of applications from EEA nurses. In addition, we are losing nurses due to overwork and poor morale.

The Government’s so-called consultation focused only on implementation rather than looking carefully at alternative ways of funding nurse training to ensure both fairness and a stable increased supply of nurses. The excellent speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock, clearly demonstrates that there are many different ways of doing that, and I am not convinced that the Government have taken all those proposals into account. They ought to stop in their tracks and look at all those alternatives before going ahead with this regulation. We are still waiting for information about how or whether the practice placements will be funded, wherever that is—in the NHS or in the care services. As we have heard, nurses have to do 2,300 hours in a clinical placement. This requires considerable resource input from the hospitals or care placements, and most hospitals are already in deficit. Without proper resources there is no way that the system can accommodate 10,000 extra student nurses, even if, as we all hope, the Government are right and universities do offer that many additional places.

I understand where the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, is coming from. Clearly, the tuition fees and loans system has not put off students on most university courses. However, nurses are different from other students, so it is not a given that they would respond like students on other courses to the need to take out loans and pay fees. They are more predominantly from lower socioeconomic groups and have a higher proportion of mature students with family commitments. They spend nearly half their course time in supernumerary placements in hospitals and have a higher number of contact hours and weeks than other students. That makes it more difficult for them to get a part-time job to fund their living expenses, as other students can do. Indeed, because they are not highly paid, it has been calculated that the vast majority of them—I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins—will not have paid off their student loans over 30 years, so they will be written off. It makes me sad to have to say that but it is a fact. Some even have other student loans from other courses that they have previously undertaken. So this strategy of the Government will not necessarily save much money in total but will simply shift the debt off the books, which I suppose was the objective of the exercise.

The Government have been very hasty. Instead of arbitrarily removing the bursaries we need a thoroughgoing investigation into the factors affecting nurse recruitment and retention, because the latter is a very important factor. It is no use filling up the bucket if there is a great big hole in the bottom—and in this case there is. Retention of student nurses to the end of their course is poor, and retention of nurses and midwives beyond the first two years after qualification is also poor. Therefore, not for the first time I ask the Minister whether he will ensure that attrition data is collected in a consistent way so that we can identify those settings that are good at keeping their students, nurses and midwives and those that are not. We can then learn from the best practice and spread it.

The impact of the Government’s plans on admissions, student numbers and quality and on the stability of the qualified workforce is yet unclear, and the Government have not said how they intend to monitor the impact on the workforce. Without a solid evidence base this policy should not go ahead. I therefore support the regret Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clark, and call on the Government to think again.