NHS Funding Bill

Debate between Janet Daby and Jonathan Ashworth

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 27th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend speaks movingly about the situation in her local trust. Of course, St George’s is one of the trusts that has a high maintenance backlog of around £99 million. The reason why hospitals such as St George’s have maintenance backlogs, which mean that they cannot get the flow through the hospital that is needed so that my hon. Friend’s constituents are treated on time, is because capital budgets have been raided repeatedly. The underfunding of the NHS has been such that NHS chiefs have had to shift money from capital budgets into the day-to-day running of the NHS. That is what Tory austerity has done to our NHS. That is what Tory austerity means for my hon. Friend’s constituents.

[Janet Daby]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we have a crisis in respect of mental health nurses, who are not being recruited and supported in the way in which they should be? Not only is that putting strain on the mental health nurses who are there, but it will affect patient care as well.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, we are short of 44,000 nurses across the whole national health service. One of the most damaging policy decisions that George Osborne made—probably another of the Secretary of State’s ideas—was to cut nurse training places in 2011 and get rid of the training bursary. The Government say that they will bring back a grant, but they are not going to go the whole hog, are they? They are not going to get rid of tuition fees. They still expect people to train to be nurses and build up huge debts, because the nature of the training that they have to go through means that they will not be able to take a job on the side. I do not believe that is the way we should recruit nurses for the future; we should bring back the whole bursary for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals.