NHS Staffing Levels

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance again, Mr Hollobone. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) for securing a really important debate.

I want to say a massive thank you to NHS and care staff. Undoubtedly, every year is a tough one for those working in this area, but the last few years have been incredibly demanding. The pandemic has taken its toll on people’s mental and physical health, and has led to real attrition within the various clinical and non-clinical services. It is worth bearing in mind how much worse it would have been had we not collectively taken the right decision to try to tackle the pandemic early on. Nevertheless, it has been incredibly hard.

I will focus on a few areas that are significant for NHS staffing, starting with dentistry. It is worth bearing in mind that we all pay our taxes, so 100% of my tax-paying constituents have paid for NHS dentistry, but only about a third of them are getting it, including roughly half of the children. At the moment—I have checked—there is not a single NHS dental place anywhere in the entire county of Cumbria, which is a disgrace. That could be solved in no small part if the Government were to address the issue of the treadmill of units of dental activity. If it were done differently, it would not necessarily cost the Government any more money to make sure that they do not push dentists into a position where they feel that they have no alternative professionally than to leave the NHS, that we bring back the people who have left, and that we value the ones we have working within it.

Secondly, I want to talk about GPs. The simple reality is that we have far fewer GPs entering the service than we need. Many rural communities in Britain, such as mine, have a smaller surgery population-wise because of the vast area that they cover. We are currently dealing with the potential closure of the Ambleside and Hawkshead medical practices—the Central Lakes Medical Group. It is out to tender at the moment, because the Government removed what was called the minimum practice income guarantee, a sum of money that made small rural surgeries financially sustainable. Their removal has led to three closures that I can think of in Cumbria—one in Eden and two in South Lakeland. A relatively small amount of money would keep those surgeries sustainable and make sure that we kept people working at them. Otherwise, we have NHS staff who are determined to work and serve those communities who simply find that they cannot.

Nothing is more important to solving the NHS staffing crisis than tackling care—we have talked about that a lot—and it is outrageous that the Government have chosen to kick dealing with that issue into the long grass for another two years. We have 32% bed-blocking in the hospitals of south Cumbria at the moment. The reason why is obvious: there are not enough care packages to help people when they leave hospital, because there are not enough carers. The impact on hospital capacity, on the capacity of A&E, on ambulances that take so much longer to drop off their patients and therefore take longer to respond to calls, and the lives put at risk, is blindingly obvious. For the Government to delay dealing with care, and to think it is delayable for two years is not a tough decision for them. It is a tough decision for the millions of people who will be affected and for the tens of thousands of people working in our care sector.

The lack of availability of affordable homes for care workers and NHS workers in communities like mine is also worth bearing in mind; that is a major reason why there are not enough staff working in health and social care. We now understand that the Government will kick the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill into the grass on the other side of Christmas. That was an opportunity for the Government to decide that they would change the law to protect homes for local occupancy.

My final comment is on the cancer staffing situation. We currently have an outrageous situation where, in the south of Cumbria, 43% of people diagnosed with cancer are not getting their first treatment for two months, and 62% in north Cumbria are not getting their treatment for two months. That is an outrage. It is costing lives. Undoubtedly, staffing is a major part of that. I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group for radiotherapy, and we are to meet the Minister or his colleagues soon. Can I press him for a date?

In the meantime, I will share one important statistic with him. Radiotherapy UK surveyed 622 radiotherapy professionals—10% of the entire workforce nationwide—and 94% of them felt that the Government did not understand the impact of the current situation on their service; 72% felt that NHS senior managers did not either. As a consequence, we are losing people from the industry. We need a workforce plan specifically for cancer.

I hope the Minister will agree to meet with me and the APPG soon so that we can give him the all-party manifesto on radiotherapy, which will solve some of the problems and give those working in the NHS, particularly in cancer, some hope for the future.