NHS Staff: Oxfordshire

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Layla Moran]

Not at all; I thank the hon. Gentleman for his helpful intervention. He is right to foreshadow what is coming later. The more times we make the point, the better, because it is the crux of the issue in Oxfordshire. On the pay cap, when will we see the timetable for the pay review? We need to ensure that the basic cost of living at least is covered. I will come on to housing later.

I am glad about the renewed focus on social care in the Department since the reshuffle, but I sincerely hope that it extends beyond just a name change. Staffing levels for the sector are even worse than in nursing in Oxfordshire. One of the more surprising facts I have learned in recent months has been about how many social care staff are leaving the service locally to fill positions in the retail sector created by the opening of the shiny new Westgate centre in Oxford. Pay is at a similar level, but the work is less stressful, so the people doing those vital social care jobs are deciding that they would rather do something else and take the easier path.

It is not just pay that we are talking about; Oxfordshire pays well for such jobs in comparison with other parts of the country. Our area still struggles to recruit and keep people. The recently published Care Quality Commission report for Oxfordshire found that

“The system in Oxfordshire was particularly challenged by the issues of workforce retention and recruitment across all professions and staff grades”,

and that “countless” concerns had been expressed about recruitment and retention, and their impact on developing a skilled and sustainable workforce.

The report goes on to highlight the need to do more to increase professional development. We must ensure that budgets are available for continuous professional development within the NHS, allowing existing staff to train, develop and build their career over time. Without such opportunities, it is little wonder that they move on. That has been raised vociferously by nursing leads as another key factor in the retention crisis. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about CPD and whether the budget for that will be increased.

Then there is overall funding. At the election, all political parties pledged more, but it was not enough. Rather than just talking about how much, I want to talk about how we can be honest with the public about how to pay for more funding, if we are all agreed that that is needed. In the short term, my party would like to see a ring-fenced penny in the pound on income tax, providing a £6 billion cash injection. In the longer term, and as a replacement for national insurance, on the basis of wide consultation, we advocate a dedicated health and social care tax. The advantage of that would be that people could see in their pay packets exactly what we were paying for.

We also want an NHS and care convention to bring together all political parties and stakeholders, so we stop using the NHS and social care as the political football it was during the election. Recently a letter on the issue backed by nearly 100 MPs was sent to the Prime Minister, but I was saddened to see that it was not taken up. I therefore urge the Minister not only to continue to ask the Prime Minister and the Treasury for more money for the NHS but, critically, to back something along the lines of a cross-party NHS and care convention, so that we can take the NHS out of the hands of political pundits and put it back into the hands of patients, where it belongs.

I have talked about what I would like to see from the Government: an open and generous offer to EU citizens; a decent pay rise; better funding, which is not kicked about as much; improved working conditions; and action on bursaries and training for nurses. But, to come to the point made so eloquently earlier, that will not cut the mustard for Oxfordshire, because our biggest issue by far is the prohibitive cost of housing in the county.

I will share an email I received from one of my constituents in Kidlington who works for the NHS. She contacted me to say that she feels as though she will never be able to afford a house of her own:

“I work for the NHS and although it comes with fantastic benefits and, I hope, great security it doesn’t pay like those who would be doing the same job as me as an office manager, in the private sector.

My situation is that I have been working for NHS nearly 9 years now. I want to move out and I live in Kidlington. To have a slight chance I would have to do shared ownership. Although not ideal it is a great stepping stone, and you have to start somewhere. However, if I was to look outside Kidlington, the Bicester area where there is up and coming new builds, the prices are still out of my range. It is disheartening to be rejected, especially when you are literally outside the affordability, yet you have worked, paid taxes and generally contributed to society.”

That is a damning indictment, and the despair is shared by so many public sector workers across Oxfordshire. A 2017 study by Lloyds bank listed Oxford as the most expensive city in which to live in the UK, with the average house price now 11 times average earnings. The recent CQC report on Oxfordshire found that staff at every level cited cost of living and housing as barriers to staff recruitment and retention.

There have been some steps in the right direction. As the Minster will know, in March 2016 the OUH trust launched a scheme in which new nursing recruits were offered a cash incentive equivalent to their first month’s rent and a deposit. I have no doubt that the council, the NHS and other organisations in other parts of the county, as we have heard, are doing everything they can—I am not here to bash them—but the fact is that the new houses to be built will not fix the problem. At best, the models show that house prices may flatline over time, but the definition of affordable as 80% of the value of incredibly expensive houses is still nowhere near enough to tackle the problem for public sector workers.

I can propose a solution. I would like to see some kind of Oxfordshire housing allowance for public sector workers given to local NHS staff to help them meet the extremely high cost of living and to tackle our recruitment crisis. Unison’s Oxfordshire health branch has called for the reintroduction of an Oxford weighting to help staff with living costs in the area, in line with the NHS weighting already paid to staff in London. I prefer not to do that, simply because “more pay” can be seen as “more valued”, which is not what that is meant to be. I would prefer to see the introduction of a specific payment for housing—a specific payment for a specific problem.

I am open to exploring all options, and I am very keen to hear what fellow Oxfordshire MPs and others think. Without an Oxfordshire housing allowance in some form, we will always struggle to recruit the NHS staff we require. Moreover, we need to start doing something now.

To conclude, the Government can and must take a role collaboratively with stakeholders to recognise the unique situations and challenges that we face in Oxfordshire. If we do nothing, we risk the rationing of care and treatments and, rightly, a backlash from our constituents. God forbid that anything should happen to a single patient as a result of any of the issues I have described today. It is our duty to tackle the problems head on and to ensure that we recruit and retain the staff whom patients deserve and our local NHS desperately needs.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

The debate can last until 1 o’clock. I will call the Front-Bench spokespeople at 12.30 pm, so other Members have 10 or so minutes each. I call Victoria Prentis.