NHS Bursaries

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. If he is stating the facts, then I interpret them as being a poor record for the Government; that is more about the facts than about the way in which he presented them.

Let us be clear: we are talking about a debt that nurses are never likely to pay off. They will graduate with debts of between £50,000 and £60,000. Many of the mature students who take nursing as a second degree will find themselves with more than £100,000 of debt. Let me repeat that figure so that it sinks in: our country is looking down the barrel of a policy that will saddle nurses with a six-figure debt. They are not bankers or lawyers; the people who keep the NHS going will be earning just a fraction of what they earn. We already have the highest level of student debt in the English-speaking world, which is not a record we should be proud of, and these proposals will only make matters worse.

It would be an error to put nurses into the same category as other students, but I think that the Government are making that error. Student nurses’ courses take up much more of the year, meaning that they have much less opportunity than other students to work while they study. They are also required to spend 50% of the time working with patients in clinical practice, including on evening and weekend shifts. That requires a real commitment of at least 2,300 hours over the length of their course, during which they do difficult jobs at unsocial times. Now the Government are asking them to pay for the privilege of doing that. This policy is like some kind of perverse extension of workfare. Last year, there were 10,000 unfilled nurse places in London alone. Is getting people to work for free really the answer to that?

The Government really need to raise their game to improve retention among nurses. The situation has been getting steadily worse over the past few years, and nearly 9% of nurses left last year. Some might have gone to work elsewhere in the NHS, but many have left the profession altogether. Surely sorting that out would provide a more effective solution to our problems than taking a punt on an untested plan. There appears to have been no dialogue with providers, who seem unaware of the oncoming rush. Each student nurse has to be clinically assessed by a registered nurse who has done their mentoring and assessing course, but no assessment appears to have been made of the capacity for trusts to take on those extra responsibilities.

It is clear that this policy, with all its flaws, was announced with no consultation, no engagement with the sector and no evidence basis. With such a high degree of uncertainty, surely it would have been sensible to consult on the principle before embarking on the policy. But not this Government; they know best, even though they do not seem to know their own record in this area. When I asked the Minister a simple written question on how many nurses had qualified in the last five years, I received the following response:

“The Department does not hold information on the number of nurses who qualified in the last five years”.

What an absolute shambles!

Anyone would think that with such a gap in the available evidence, the Government would have gone out of their way to undertake a full consultation and to seek out evidence before announcing the policy, but no. The Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Podiatry and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists are all respected institutions with years of experience and a wealth of knowledge in this area, but not one of them was asked to make a formal input into this policy before it was announced, contrary to what the Minister has said today. When he was asked, in a Westminster Hall debate on 11 January, who he had consulted, he said:

“There has been consultation with leading nursing professionals.”—[Official Report, 11 January 2016; Vol. 604, c. 237WH.]

He said nothing about the royal colleges. I hope that we shall be able to clear this up. I ask him to tell us exactly who he did consult, and to place in the Library a copy of the advice that he received following the consultation.

Let us not pretend, now that the consultation has been published, that it is a meaningful consultation on the principle or the detail of the proposals. It simply asks a few technical questions on how to implement the changes. You can have any colour you want as long as it is black. It is frankly an insult to the public, to patients and to the profession. The Government should withdraw this proposal and instead commit to a full consultation on how to improve the support available to student nurses, how to increase the number of nurses in the NHS and how to improve retention. I urge all Members who genuinely care about the future of our health service, who have concerns about the potential deterrent effect of these proposals, and who are not prepared to gamble recklessly with our nurses, to join us in the Lobby today and send a clear message to the Government that it is time to think again. I commend the motion to the House.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Pick that one out of the back of the net!