Interim NHS People Plan

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op) (Urgent Question)]

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to make a statement on the interim NHS people plan.

[The Minister for Health (Stephen Hammond)]

The NHS published its interim people plan on Monday, and I laid a written ministerial statement at the earliest opportunity yesterday.

The plan is a first, but critically important, step in ensuring that the NHS has the people, leadership and culture it needs to deliver the NHS long-term plan. The interim people plan has been developed by Baroness Dido Harding, the chair of NHS Improvement, in partnership with frontline staff, NHS employers and a wider range of other representative groups and stakeholders. It takes a tough look at the challenges facing people working across the NHS. It sets out how leaders will be supported to create cultures that empower staff and make sure that every member of staff, regardless of their background, will be able to progress.

Critically, the plan calls for all NHS organisations to set out how they will ensure that the NHS is the best place to work. The recently appointed chief people officer for the NHS will play a vital role in supporting the NHS to do this. The interim people plan sets out a number of practical steps to increase the supply of clinical staff. This includes an extra 5,000 additional clinical placements for nurse training places by September 2019 and a commitment to further expansion of medical school places.

Ultimately, the plan will ensure that the NHS is best able to retain the highly skilled and dedicated staff who choose a career in healthcare, including the most senior clinicians. Therefore, we have listened to their concerns that pension tax changes are discouraging them from doing extra work for patients. That is why Government will consult on how to introduce new flexibilities for this critically important staff group.

But we are not complacent. We know there is more work to do to secure the people, leadership and culture that the NHS needs. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has asked Baroness Harding to lead further work over the summer to prepare the final people plan. As has always been intended, the final people plan will be published soon after the conclusion of the spending review, when there will be further clarity on education and training budgets.

I would like to take this opportunity once again to place on record my thanks, and the thanks, I am sure, of everybody across the whole House, to all the NHS staff who do a wonderful job in ensuring that our constituents—their patients—get excellent care.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

It is a pleasure, as always, to see the Minister of State, but the Secretary of State should be doing his day job and be here answering questions about the health service, not playing his Tory leadership games.

Our NHS is struggling with vacancies of 100,000. Our NHS staff are the very best in the world—and none of them wants to be part of a trade deal with the Americans, of course—but they are working under immense pressure because of these chronic shortages. Shortages put patient care at risk, and that means that standards of care are falling. This means that our constituents wait longer to get a GP appointment because we have lost 1,000 GPs. It means that women are turned away from maternity units because we are short of 3,500 midwives. It means that cancer diagnosis is delayed because of shortages in the cancer workforce. As Dido Harding’s report shows, we are short of 40,000 nurses in the workforce, and that is now critical. It means that at a time when mental health problems are increasing—The Lancet reports today on an increase in non-suicidal self-harm—we have actually lost 5,000 mental health nurses since 2010. We have problems in the learning disability sector. Health Education England today warns that because of the shortages in learning disability nursing, we are set to

“hit critical levels in the next five years”,

with vacancies of 30%. We have an ageing population. Adult social care is short of 110,000 staff, and yet district nursing has been cut by 50%. We do not have enough nurses on our children’s wards. Health visitors and school nurses in our communities have been cut.

This NHS workforce crisis is linked to decisions of this Government. As Dido Harding’s report says,

“applications for nursing and midwifery courses have fallen since the education funding reforms”.

Those education funding reforms include the abolition of the bursary. Is not that therefore a damning indictment of the decision by this Government to abolish the bursary, and will the Minister now commit to bringing it back?

The report also references continuing professional development, where budgets have again been cut, by a third. It says:

“Employers have…been investing less in their people, as pressures on NHS finances have grown.”

Is that not an admission that Tory austerity, with nine years of underfunding in the NHS, has contributed to the workforce crisis of today?

The Health Secretary has said that he wants “a new Windrush Generation” of overseas nurses to fill the staffing gap, so can the Minister explain why a commitment to recruit 5,000 extra nurses a year internationally was dropped from the Dido Harding report? Did the Government put pressure on Baroness Harding? On international recruitment, can he guarantee that no one offered a job in the NHS or care sector will be restricted by the £30,000 salary cap, as the chair of Health Education England called for yesterday at the Health and Social Care Committee?

Finally, the Minister referenced the spending review. He will have seen that the Chief Secretary said yesterday at a Select Committee that the spending review is now unlikely to be ready for 2020-21. That means that new funding for training, for Health Education England and for capital investment in public health and social care will not come on stream until 2021—two years away. Does the Minister think that that is an acceptable way to deal with the NHS crisis we are facing? I urge the Minister, for whom I have a lot of respect, to accept that we cannot keep delaying this situation further. The Health Secretary needs to abandon his leadership games, focus on his day job and get a grip.