Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill

Julie Minns Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

I would like to place on record my interest as the mother of an NHS nurse.

It is a privilege to speak in today’s debate and to do so on behalf of my Carlisle constituency, which I am proud to say has recently taken a transformative step with regard to medical training, with the opening of the Pears Cumbria School of Medicine. This new graduate school of medicine is being jointly pioneered by Imperial College London and the University of Cumbria, and I put on record my thanks to Professor Martin Lupton, Professor Mary Morrell and Professor Brian Webster-Henderson, whose vision the medical school is, and to Sir Trevor Pears and the Pears Foundation, whose generosity has made their vision a reality.

As with the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill before us today, the Pears Cumbria School of Medicine purposefully prioritises home-grown talent. The school also seeks applications from students from non-traditional backgrounds, encouraging applications from groups that are less well represented in medicine. As part of the school’s commitment to widening access, the four-year graduate programme has no GCSE or A-level requirements. The reason for this approach is simple: it provides the best chance, year in, year out and generation after generation, for Carlisle and Cumbria to produce our own doctors. These doctors will often come from the surrounding communities and, in part because of where they are trained, will be deeply committed to the local area and its people.

In geographically remote areas such as ours, the ability to train and retain our own doctors is critical. It matters enormously. Cumbria faces some of the most entrenched health inequalities in the country. We have struggled for years with recruitment and retention across both primary and secondary care, and our hospital trust relies heavily on locums. We know all too well that the traditional model of medical education, centred on large metropolitan teaching hospitals, simply does not produce or attract the workforce that rural areas such as mine need.

That brings me back to the Bill before us today. The Government are right to prioritise UK graduates for foundation and specialty training places. The Bill represents a significant and welcome step towards restoring confidence in the training pipeline, addressing the growing mismatch between the number of medical graduates and the number of available posts, and ensuring that those who have invested years of training in our NHS are not left without a route on which to progress. It is a sensible, fair-minded reform that will bring much-needed stability to a system that has been under real strain.

For Carlisle and Cumbria, however, the issue is not only who gets priority but where the training posts are located. At present, although foundation training can be delivered locally, it can be delivered only where accredited F1 and F2 posts exist. In Cumbria, the number of those posts is limited. The North Cumbria integrated care trust is able to provide places for some foundation trainees, and others will find F1 and F2 posts in primary and community care settings, but further accredited places will be required at foundation level. I ask the Minister to explain, in her response, not just how the new powers will prioritise UK medical graduates and members of the priority group, but how the powers might be used to widen the availability of accredited F1 and F2 posts in areas such as Cumbria, where there is a shortage of doctors.

Even if we successfully retain Pears medical school doctors in Cumbria for their foundation programme training, the risk of losing them when they come to their specialty training programme is even greater, because doctors will overwhelmingly choose to settle near to where they complete their training, particularly their specialist training, and Cumbria will never be able to provide every specialty training pathway within the county to retain our home-grown talent. We simply do not have the population size or the case mix to deliver all specialisms in our trusts. However, that does not mean that we cannot design a system that keeps trainees connected to Cumbria throughout their training. I therefore urge the Minister to consider how the regulation-making powers granted by the Bill can address that issue.

Pears medical school believes that a new approach to specialist training is the way forward. I recently wrote to the Secretary of State seeking a meeting between him and representatives of the medical school to explore that approach, and I very much hope that he will soon accept that meeting. I also ask Ministers to consider seriously how specialty training can be structured so that trainees who complete F2 in Cumbria are supported to remain based in the region, even if their specialist rotations take them elsewhere for short periods. That could mean funded return-to-base arrangements, rotational models anchored in Cumbria, or formal partnerships between specialist centres in UK cities and community providers in Cumbria. In other words, we need a training pathway that allows people to specialise with Cumbria, not away from it, because if we allow the system to pull trainees out of Carlisle at the very moment they are beginning to put down roots, we will simply recreate and repeat the cycle that has left rural areas like mine short of doctors for too long.

The Pears Cumbria School of Medicine is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the medical workforce in Cumbria, but it will fully succeed only if training programmes are aligned with its purpose. In welcoming the Bill, I urge Ministers to ensure that its implementation meets the requirements and needs of remote communities. Prioritisation is important, but place matters too.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee.