NHS Bursaries

Debate between Ben Gummer and Mark Spencer

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer]

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman is wrong on both points: more mature students are applying now than in 2010; and there are specific recommendations in the consultation to deal with mature students.

[Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

Does this not demonstrate the Minister’s point? We have a choice: we either inspire people to aspire and give them the opportunity to enter the NHS by talking it up, or we take the opposite view, talk the NHS down by being negative, and put people off.

[Ben Gummer]

I do believe that. The Opposition were wrong back in 2010, and had we followed their advice, fewer people from disadvantaged backgrounds—precisely the people Labour was elected to represent and support—would be going to university. As a result of our taking forward brave proposals, in the teeth of much opposition, we have done more for the prospects of people from disadvantaged backgrounds than any Government dealing with this matter since higher education was reformed after the second world war.

I come now, I am afraid, to the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Lewisham East. It implicitly accepts that we have made progress. The fact that it is so anaemic in offering an alternative makes it clear that there is no alternative suggestion that she thinks would achieve the aims that she and I want: an increase in the number of students going into nursing and training, and of those coming from a diverse background. It also implies that she accepts, like me, that workforce planning over the last 10, 15, 20, 30 or 40 years has failed. I can say that, whereas she is not willing to, because everything we are doing now to correct workforce numbers—for example, the 5,000 additional GPs my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary fought the last election campaign on and will be delivering in the next few years—is the result of poor commissioning decisions made not under the coalition Government, or even in the latter years of the Labour Government, but under Governments 20 and 30 years ago.

The failure to predict the number of GPs needed, and the number and types of other professionals needed, lands us perpetually in this perverse situation where we are not accepting British students on to training courses at British universities and, as a result, are not creating the numbers of domestically trained nurses we need. In response to the inadequacies in care uncovered as a result of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandal and the failure of the Labour Government to provide the number of nurses needed in hospitals across the country, we are having to import nurses from abroad and to fill nurse places with expensive agency posts. That is something we are putting right now.

Junior Doctors’ Contract Negotiations

Debate between Ben Gummer and Mark Spencer

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer]

We believe that last year about 500 junior doctors were operating on a band 3 payment, which equates to payments for hours of work that exceed what is specified in the working time regulations. That is a relatively small number within the NHS, but it is still significant, and for the doctors concerned, working those excessive hours is unsafe.

[Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

Will the Minister join me in thanking the junior doctors who ignored the call to strike last time, and does he agree that the lack of condemnation from the Opposition demonstrates that they are putting their support for industrial action before my constituents and their healthcare needs?

[Ben Gummer]

I entirely agree. Rather like an arsonist who pours petrol on a fire and then runs to offer help to put it out, the Opposition have done very little to help to get the contract into the place where it needs to be, and to stop the industrial action. I am afraid that the patients whose operations will be cancelled this week will suffer partly because of the Opposition’s failure to take a firm stand.