NHS and Social Care: Impact of Brexit

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 21st July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, for giving your Lordships’ House an opportunity to consider such an important issue.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, I wonder whether noble Lords might consider looking at the issue from a slightly different perspective, that of a patient—in this case a little boy who spent much of his childhood up to the age of 10 in an NHS hospital bed. So frequent were those little boy’s fractures that more often than not he spent either Christmas or his birthday, which happened to be in June, with his broken leg in traction. Some years he even managed to celebrate both his birthday and Christmas in hospital. Often in pain, frightened and tearful, the boy found that the familiarity of the faces of the doctors and nurses on the children’s ward provided real comfort and reassurance. Today it might be called “continuity of care”, but for that little boy it meant everything. I know, because that little boy was me.

Would the statistics—the 52,000 staff currently working in NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups who are EU nationals, or 4.95% of the total, 7,297 of them from Poland, 7,121 from Spain, 6,227 from Portugal—have meant anything to my younger self? Probably not. Now, though, such statistics and others mean much more to my older self. For example, as has been mentioned, according to the Royal College of Nursing there are currently 23,000 EU nurses registered to work in the UK. Small wonder that the RCN argues that EU nurses make a vital contribution to the NHS and the health of the nation. What about social care? According to the King’s Fund, an estimated 6% of jobs in the UK social care sector and 12% in London’s are filled by EU migrants.

Taken together, all these statistics surely point to the fact that as a nation we need to give urgent consideration to how we grant these people the security that they need as soon as possible. My fear, as other noble Lords have expressed, is that otherwise we will not retain their valuable services. I was concerned to read the words of the chief executive of the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group on this issue, who says that,

“in some services around one quarter of the frontline workforce originate from the EU … If EU staff become anxious and leave there will be an immediate impact on capability and capacity within the sector, which will compound existing workforce shortages”.

The UK cannot afford for that to happen, not least because, as Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, so eloquently argued in his excellent article in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock, already referred:

“If home care disappears and care homes close, A&Es are quickly overwhelmed”.

Simon Stevens is surely absolutely right to make the further point that,

“it should be completely uncontroversial to provide early reassurance to international NHS employees about their continued welcome in this country”.

I therefore draw comfort from the assurance given by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health that EU nationals already working here are a welcome part of the NHS and that as a country we value them. As the editor of the Health Service Journal recently said, it is vital that existing or potential NHS staff with European backgrounds do not decide that the UK is no longer a place for them. Surely such a danger underlines the need for my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union to have securing an agreement on the status of EU nationals working in the NHS and social care very high up his to-do list.

I hope that the Brexit negotiations will be heavily influenced by both principle and pragmatism: the principle of staying true to the democratically expressed majority view of the UK public in the referendum, including as it relates to freedom of movement, and the pragmatism of ensuring that adherence to that principle reflects the generosity of spirit that makes Great Britain great.

In that vein, on this, the last day of term before we rise for the Summer Recess, I pay humble homage to a great British parliamentarian and a fellow charity campaigner so cruelly taken from us barely a month ago. I speak, of course, of Jo Cox. So much has happened since then to distract our attention. For me, that means only one thing: as her fellow parliamentarians, we must redouble our efforts to keep her precious memory alive through deeds as well as through words. A dedicated public servant, she would, I imagine, have celebrated the dedication of those EU nationals working as public servants in our NHS and social care sector. What a fitting tribute to her it would be for Her Majesty’s Government to make achieving progress in securing their status a top priority in the Brexit negotiations.