Health and Care Bill

Greg Clark Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 23rd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Medical school, the foundation years and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) said, the retention of staff—all those things need to be built into long-term planning and baked into the system.

That long-term planning strikes a contrast, if I may say so, with some of the short-termism that we have seen recently. Even in the recent Budget and spending review, the budget for Health Education England, which funds the training of doctors in this country, was not settled. Although I think that the proposed merger with NHS England is probably the right thing to do, I fear it will mean that the budget is not settled for many more months, at precisely the moment when the workforce crisis is the biggest concern for the majority of people in the NHS.

[Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I strongly support his amendment. Will he add to the list of factors that need to be considered in the future the requirement for many research scientists in medical sciences to be trained in medical schools first? If we want to expand and build on the excellence that we have there, it is not just a question of meeting the needs of the NHS workforce; we need to have extra people who can become the brilliant researchers and discoverers of new medicines in the future.

[Jeremy Hunt]

My right hon. Friend speaks about these issues with a great deal of knowledge, given his former ministerial and Select Committee roles, and he is absolutely right. I think that the big lesson from the pandemic, and indeed an issue that emerged in the report that our Committees jointly produced, is the way in which science can add value to clinical practice and clinical practice can add value to science.