Indefinite Leave to Remain: Healthcare Workers

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I rise to speak for a slightly different reason, which is that I have the honour to be the Chair of the current Petitions Committee and this is its first debate. I thank the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for an excellent contribution. He described a worrying, if not harrowing, situation. I also place on the record my thanks, at this early stage in the life of the Committee, to the Members who have joined it. Their enthusiasm is most encouraging. I cannot continue without saying that we have been hugely impressed by the work put in by the Clerks and all the team who give us the presentations and so on. I will keep my remarks very short, because we want to hear the proper detail about this particularly harrowing issue, but I want to end by saying that to my mind the work of the Petitions Committee is very important, and it has a very high hit rate from members of the public who watch the proceedings and go into Hansard to see what we said. It strikes me that that is an important part of the way we do democracy in this country. I will conclude my remarks with that.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

If Members wish to speak, they have to rise in their place.

[Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on his excellent speech introducing this important debate.

Members will know that before being elected to represent my home constituency of Ashford in July, I had spent the previous 22 years working in the national health service. As someone who also made the journey to work in the NHS from a foreign country, I will draw on my knowledge and set out in my short contribution why I support the e-petition and would back reducing from five years to two the time a foreign healthcare worker has to wait before qualifying for indefinite leave to remain. I would make the point that since I came to the UK in 2001, the rules have changed and people who have the same aspirations as I did now risk finding themselves excluded.

As we all know, the NHS is reliant on overseas workers. In the NHS workforce survey in June of this year, just under 30% of NHS staff in England reported having a non-British nationality. However, without proper incentives to both recruit and retain those workers, the employment deficit is likely to worsen. For example, in the years to June 2022 and June 2023, more nurses from the European Union and the European economic area left the NHS than joined. The picture is similar for healthcare workers from the rest of the world. In the year to June 2022, 4,702 healthcare workers left the UK, and for 2023 it was 6,610. In the year to June 2024, 7,957 workers left the UK.

The cost of recruiting and training an overseas nurse is anywhere between £50,000 and £70,000, while for a doctor it can be roughly £250,000—only for them to be tempted away by other countries with more attractive recruitment and retention policies, such as Australia and Canada. As the cost of living crisis has worsened over the past decade and a half across the country, especially in the south-east, where my Ashford constituency sits, stagnating wages and rising costs have not been a good incentive to keep staff in the NHS workforce.

This issue is also impacting patient care. Losing experienced staff is a big loss for the NHS. It takes 12 to 18 months for managers and matrons to train a newly joined staff member, so losing them in two to three years’ time is a big loss for the hospitals. Given those factors, we must rethink our retention strategy as a whole. Keeping in the United Kingdom skilled workers, especially those who have been the subject of large Government investment, is a vital step towards keeping our NHS alive and making it fit for the future. Therefore, granting healthcare workers indefinite leave to remain after two years rather than five is a necessary measure to solve the retention crisis identified by Lord Darzi in his recent independent report into our NHS.

By making a special case for healthcare workers and allowing them to make this country their permanent home after two years, we would show the importance of their roles in the NHS and our gratitude, as a nation, for their decision to come to the UK to train, learn and work in our healthcare sector.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. I should say that it is against the rules to work on a laptop while attending these debates.