NHS Pay

Eleanor Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Wollaston]

That is an important point. I very much hope that my hon. Friend will contribute to the Committee’s inquiry. As well as looking at the new routes into nursing, we will look at the skills mix, roles within health and social care more widely, the impact of Brexit and language testing, workload and morale. We will be seeking contributions from hon. Members across the House and from people outside.

As I said, we will miss something if we just look at the issue as one of pay. Pay restraint is estimated to contribute between £3.3 billion and £3.5 billion of the five year forward view efficiency savings up to 2019-20. If that goes, what will fill the gap? We have to be careful that there is no loss of services or losses in the workforce, because workforce pressures—probably more than any other issue—contribute to nursing staff leaving the profession. We have to look at the bigger picture.

[Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

I have been a nurse for 40 years, but this is not just about nursing. There are other groups as well, including occupational therapists and physiotherapists, who are also registered professionals. Along with everybody else, they are just as important as nurses.

[Dr Wollaston]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Look, for example, at the applications for nursing courses. Even though the number of applicants has gone down, it may not ultimately result in a loss of numbers entering nursing. Some of the applicants from that overall drop in numbers might have gone on to other courses, so we need to look at the bigger picture. In opting to look at the nursing workforce, the Health Committee is not saying in any way that other parts of the workforce are not important. The NHS is a team, but it would be difficult for us to report within a certain timeframe if we looked at the entire workforce. I have no doubt that we will look at other aspects of the workforce over the course of this Parliament. I assure the hon. Lady that we will not lose sight of the bigger picture and I hope that she will contribute to the inquiry.

We need to look at the big picture regarding the total budget for health and social care. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) has long made this point, and we have both made it clear that it is time for us to take a cross-party approach to sustainable funding for health and social care in the long term. I look forward to working with him on that over the course of this Parliament.

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[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

It is a great honour to have been called in this serious debate. I am pleased by the way in which it has been conducted, as we have heard some very good speeches, in particular the maiden speech by the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan). It was an amusing, entertaining, heartfelt and serious speech, and I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman will make valuable contributions in this Parliament and in years to come. It was a salutary speech because it gave one faith in the House of Commons.

Having been a Member for seven years, I have seen many debates—and some yah-boo politics—in which people apportioned blame for the crisis. Labour says that the Tories cut too much and that it was all the bankers’ fault that we had a deficit of £160 billion—the largest peace-time deficit in our history. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who was a Front-Bench member of the coalition Government for their full five years, will remember clearly the context in which we came up with the difficult policy of the pay cap. It was not a whimsy, and we did not do it for the hell of it to put people under pressure. The pay cap was a serious response to a difficult and chronic problem—the deficit.

I do not want to apportion blame, and I echo my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in recognising that the global crash was not entirely Labour’s fault—I am willing to give it that—but the history of the public finances from 2001, eight years before the financial crisis happened, shows that we ran a deficit in every single one of those years. To borrow a phrase—a mantra—from a departed colleague, Labour did not fix the roof while the sun was shining. The Labour party had a record of fiscal incompetence, and it was against that backdrop that public sector pay restraint became an issue. It is important to look at the history to explain why the pay cap was instituted in 2011.

[Eleanor Smith]

The hon. Gentleman talks about eight years, but Andrew Lansley’s Bill basically destroyed the NHS. That is why we are in this state with the pay cap. I think the hon. Gentleman has forgotten about that.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

I would like to allow the hon. Lady to speak early on, and there is nothing wrong with intervening, but we do need short interventions. That would be great. I need to know if Members will be giving way, too. I would like to get all speakers in, but the more interventions we have the less chance there is that I will be able to do that.

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[Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry).

As a nurse of 40 years, I can say that the issue we are debating today is close to my heart. I, like many other NHS staff, struggled to make ends meet with the 1% pay cap, which acted as a pay cut. Since 2010, NHS staff who have decided to stay in the profession have experienced a real-terms pay cut of 14%. They are overstretched and undervalued, which is making patient care in the NHS a real concern. The 1% cap is forcing many experienced staff out of the profession, putting strain on those left. Others are pushed into the arms of agencies where they could earn many times their normal hourly rate, and others pursue a second job to make ends meet, working extra hours to increase their earnings. This puts a strain not only on their financial life, but on their family too.

In my constituency of Wolverhampton South West, I have constituents who work as nurses telling me they are leaving the NHS because of increasing workloads, which has caused them great stress, and years of pay restraint that has left them feeling undervalued and demoralised. Many hard-working nurses are turning to food banks, facing missing meals and struggling to pay their bills. Pay has not increased, but utility and grocery bills have. The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust employs over 8,000, and 7,297 are non-medical staff. Another constituent who is a ward manager at a local rehabilitation hospital in Wolverhampton contacted me explaining how she had been fortunate to train with an NHS bursary and to then be employed there as a staff nurse since 2001.

In response to a recent question by my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), the relevant Health Minister said that the Government changed the funding system for pre-registration tuition and bursaries to the standard student support system. This change means we have moved away from centrally imposed number controls and financial limitations, and therefore the artificial cap has been removed. That is not the case, as the latest UCAS figures show that applications for midwifery and nursing have fallen by 23% this year as health students are put off under this Government. Under this Government, it is difficult to train and to make a living as a nurse. That is why I am proud to have stood and been elected in the 2017 general election on Labour’s pledge, in a fully costed manifesto, to scrap the NHS pay cap and reinstate bursaries—unlike the Tories, who have given out massive tax giveaways worth £70 billion over five years.