Nurses and Midwives: Fees

Dai Havard Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Havard. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). We recently had the pleasure of serving for 13 hours that we will never get back on the Committee for the National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill, which my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) promoted. It is quite a novelty to speak in a health debate in which hon. Members have actually spoken about health. It feels quite unique after the debates in that Committee.

As is customary, I place on the record my appreciation of and congratulations to the petitioners, who managed to achieve the number of signatures necessary for the debate, and my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) and the Backbench Business Committee on getting it on the Floor of Westminster Hall today. I also pay tribute to all who work in our national health service, not only the nurses and midwives in particular, but everyone who helps make the NHS the service that it is. We are now only five and a half weeks from the next general election and we are in the last full week of the 2010 to 2015 Parliament. Issues such as the one that we are debating show the direction in which our health service has been heading.

It is totally wrong to impose further charges on nurses and midwives, especially when many are facing a cost of living crisis caused by the Government. Wages are falling and prices rising; this is now set to be the first time in living memory when people will be worse off at the end of a Parliament than they were at the beginning. Yet the Nursing and Midwifery Council wants to increase the burden on the shoulders of registrants. What message does that send to the nurses, midwives and patients whose interests it is there to protect? I think a pretty poor one.

We have all had similar cases, but the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) put her constituent’s very eloquently. I am sure that other Members have such cases to pursue with Ministers, which highlight the issues surrounding the debate. We are talking about not only numbers, but real people, and it is right for such matters to be raised. Taken together with the 1% pay rise—for which, to put it bluntly, nurses had to fight tooth and nail after the Government initially indicated that they would not honour their pledge—the move we are discussing today shows what the Government think of public sector workers. When Labour gets into power, clearly we will have to look carefully at the books, but we absolutely will not do what this Government have done: break every single promise made to NHS staff.

As we have heard throughout the debate, in particular from my hon. Friends the Members for Blaydon, for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) and for Foyle, the Government should have introduced the Law Commission’s draft Bill on the regulation of health and social care professionals, which included some good measures. Had the Government introduced it, it would have enabled the NMC to increase efficiencies and decrease costs. Instead, the Government have been introducing a swathe of delegated legislation to form something of a patchwork quilt of reform. Indeed, I seem to remember, Mr Havard, that you chaired two statutory instrument Committees only last week—

[Mr Dai Havard (in the Chair)]

At the same time.