NHS Bursaries

John Glen Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer]

I do believe that. The Opposition were wrong back in 2010, and had we followed their advice, fewer people from disadvantaged backgrounds—precisely the people Labour was elected to represent and support—would be going to university. As a result of our taking forward brave proposals, in the teeth of much opposition, we have done more for the prospects of people from disadvantaged backgrounds than any Government dealing with this matter since higher education was reformed after the second world war.

I come now, I am afraid, to the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Lewisham East. It implicitly accepts that we have made progress. The fact that it is so anaemic in offering an alternative makes it clear that there is no alternative suggestion that she thinks would achieve the aims that she and I want: an increase in the number of students going into nursing and training, and of those coming from a diverse background. It also implies that she accepts, like me, that workforce planning over the last 10, 15, 20, 30 or 40 years has failed. I can say that, whereas she is not willing to, because everything we are doing now to correct workforce numbers—for example, the 5,000 additional GPs my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary fought the last election campaign on and will be delivering in the next few years—is the result of poor commissioning decisions made not under the coalition Government, or even in the latter years of the Labour Government, but under Governments 20 and 30 years ago.

The failure to predict the number of GPs needed, and the number and types of other professionals needed, lands us perpetually in this perverse situation where we are not accepting British students on to training courses at British universities and, as a result, are not creating the numbers of domestically trained nurses we need. In response to the inadequacies in care uncovered as a result of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandal and the failure of the Labour Government to provide the number of nurses needed in hospitals across the country, we are having to import nurses from abroad and to fill nurse places with expensive agency posts. That is something we are putting right now.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

One of the main pieces of feedback I have had from Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust is its frustration at the reliance on agency nurses, so I welcome the Government’s moves, because they will open up supply and reduce that reliance and the significant additional costs we have seen over the last few years.

[Ben Gummer]

It is precisely to help my hon. Friend’s hospital that we are introducing these reforms.