Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill

Ben Coleman Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

We set UK medical school places based on future health system needs. We cannot control how many places the overseas campus universities create, whether they are UK-based universities or not. Prioritising those graduates in the way that the right hon. Gentleman suggests would undermine sustainable workforce planning. It would also undermine social mobility and fair access. Those campuses are commercial ventures; they receive no public funding and students are generally self-funded. The nature of prioritisation is that we set priorities, and these are the priorities that this Government are setting out. We must break our over-reliance on international recruitment.

As I have said, I am proud of the fact that the NHS is an international employer, and it is no coincidence that the Empire Windrush landed on these shores in 1948, the very year our NHS was founded. We are lucky that we have people from around the world who come and work in our health and care service. Since Brexit, however, under the last Government, we have begun to see something much more corrosive, with the NHS poaching staff from countries on the World Health Organisation’s red list because their own shortages of medical practitioners are so severe. The continued plundering of doctors from countries that desperately need them while we have an army of talented and willing recruits who cannot get jobs is morally unacceptable. If some Opposition Members want to defend that record and dismiss the morality argument, I would point out that that position is naive on economic grounds. Competition for medical staff has never been fiercer. The World Health Organisation estimates a shortfall of 11 million health workers by 2030. Shoring up our own workforce will limit our exposure to such global pressures without depriving other countries of their own home-grown talent.

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his excellent speech and the strong points that he is delivering. I associate myself with the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) about Malta. As a member of the Health and Social Care Committee, I have also been approached by Queen Mary University. It seems to me that we should be approaching this with a sense of fairness, and if students have entered into a GMC-recognised course with the expectation of having priority access for foundation status, we should accept that those who are currently in training still enjoy that, even if we change the rules for people who enter those courses in the future. Is that something that my right hon. Friend will consider?

[Wes Streeting]

As I have said, the position we have set out is founded on fairness. The basis on which people have applied to these universities has made it clear that the universities cannot guarantee places and that overseas applicants studying at UK universities’ overseas campuses can still apply. There is nothing to prevent those people from applying, but when it comes to prioritisation, we are prioritising UK-trained medical graduates from UK-based universities who have undertaken their training here in the UK. I think that is the right priority to draw.