NHS Workforce Expansion

Debate between Wes Streeting and Alex Sobel

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am delighted that the hon. Member asks. I had a good meeting with the British Medical Association pensions committee recently. There are a number of ways in which this matter could be resolved, one of which might be a tax-unregistered scheme, which we have seen used successfully in the judiciary. [Interruption.] I am perfectly fine with having a tax-unregistered scheme. I think the difference between the Opposition and the Government is that the Government have an army of civil servants to do the modelling. That is what I would like the Government to do. I say to the hon. Member again that it is no use lobbying the next Government—lobby the current Government.

Turning again to the international picture, the NHS is having to recruit from countries on the World Health Organisation’s red list—countries that desperately need the few doctors and nurses they have—because our Government cannot be bothered to train their own. I think that is unethical, immoral, a disgrace and a kick in the teeth for the UK students who desperately want to be the doctors, nurses, midwives and allied health professionals that our country needs.

The Chancellor is refusing to budge, I believe, on cost grounds, but Labour’s plan before the House today would cost £1.6 billion a year. We have shown how we would pay for it: scrapping non-doms would raise more than £3 billion. If the Chancellor needs any tips about the non-doms system, or if perhaps he is worried that non-doms might flee the country, he need only knock on his next-door neighbour’s door to see a case in point. He will find out how the system works, and that when people are asked politely to pay their taxes here, they do not flee the country.

Inaction also has costs. The NHS spent an eye-watering £3 billion on agency staff last year. One hospital was so desperate that it paid £5,200 for a doctor to work a single shift. Does that not sum up the approach of this Government: penny wise and pound foolish?

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a remarkable speech. My constituent Marjorie Dunn spent seven weeks and a day in Harrogate Hospital last year, and in that time she saw NHS nurses leave the service and she was treated predominantly by agency staff—mistreated, I have to say, by agency staff. It is a disgrace. When she was eventually moved to a recovery hub run by Leeds City Council, she got excellent treatment there. She had broken her pelvis and been told she would never walk again, but it was the council physiotherapist who got her up and walking again. Is it not right that we should be supporting local authorities such as Labour-run Leeds to get such facilities as well as the NHS?

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I very much enjoyed my visit to Leeds with the shadow Chancellor to look at the work the acute trust is doing with Leeds City Council to speed up delayed discharges. He is absolutely right about the impact of the churn of staff on a ward—because they are not regular staff on a contract of employment at a particular hospital or medical facility—and it can be quite distressing for patients to see the faces and names change every day and to constantly be explaining once again what their experience in the hospital has been, if indeed the staff have time to stop and talk.

I am really struck by the fact that one of the biggest issues that staff raise with me is the moral injury. The fact is that they are busting a gut and working their socks off, and they go home at the end of the day deeply demoralised, distressed and depressed because they know that, despite their very best efforts, they are not providing the quality of care that patients deserve, through no fault of their own. That is why, even above the issues of pay and of terms and conditions, which I think many of us would understand in and of themselves, I think the straw that is breaking the camel’s back is the moral injury. Unless we address that, we are going to lose the brilliant staff we have, before we even start to think about recruiting the staff we need.

NHS Workforce

Debate between Wes Streeting and Alex Sobel

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House recognises that the National Health Service is facing the worst workforce crisis in its history with a shortage of 9,000 hospital doctors and 50,000 nurses; condemns the Government’s failure to train enough NHS staff to tackle this crisis; regrets that, as a result, patients are finding it impossible to get a GP appointment, ambulance or operation when they need one; calls on the Government to end the 200-year-old non-domiciled tax status regime which currently costs taxpayers £3.2 billion a year; and further calls on the Government to use part of the funds raised to invest in the NHS workforce by doubling the number of medical training places, delivering 10,000 more nursing and midwifery clinical placements, training twice the number of district nurses per year and delivering 5,000 more health visitors to guarantee that the NHS has the staff to ensure every patient can access the care they need.

The NHS is facing the worst crisis in its history. Seven million people are waiting for NHS treatment, and they are waiting longer than ever before; 400,000 patients have been waiting for more than a year. Heart attack and stroke patients are waiting an hour for an ambulance, on average, when every minute matters. “24 Hours in A&E” is not just a TV programme; it is the grim reality facing patients in an emergency. Behind those statistics are people being held back from living their lives: people forced to give up work because they cannot stand the pain; young people, still bearing the scars of lockdown, unable to get the mental health support they need to step into adulthood; families losing loved ones for no other reason than that the NHS was unable to treat them in time.

My friend and colleague the shadow Leader of the House shared with me an email from one of her constituents. A patient with suspected cancer was urgently referred by his GP, which ought to mean being seen by a specialist within a fortnight. Four weeks later he had heard nothing. He phoned the hospital and was told, “two weeks currently means six weeks” and that he would be contacted, not seen, within the next two weeks. He has now had his appointment, during which the doctor identified cancerous cells. He has been told that he will wait up to eight months to have that cancer removed. He said that until waiting lists are down,

“more people will die unnecessarily from cancer. I hope not to be one of them.”

That is not uncommon. That is where we are. That is why Labour is today putting forward our plan to solve this crisis, make the NHS fit for the future, and get patients treated on time again.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Yesterday I spoke to a paramedic who had been with a patient with sepsis, waiting for two and a half hours to be taken in. There were 98 calls at that same Yorkshire hospital waiting to go in. Are we now post-crisis and in complete breakdown, and do we need Labour’s plans to come in now, and not have to wait?

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. As the Leader of the Opposition has said, the NHS is not on its knees; it is on the floor. How many times were we told during the pandemic that restrictions were needed to stop the NHS falling over? It has now fallen over, and for the first time in its history people no longer feel certain that, when they phone 999 or arrive at A&E, they will be seen in time. It is the first time in our country’s history that people have not felt confident that emergency medicine will be there for them when they need it.

The Conservatives blame the crisis in the NHS on everything from the weather to the pandemic, and even NHS staff. Of course there is no doubt that the pandemic has made things worse, but the Government—the Conservative party—sent the NHS into the pandemic with 100,000 staff shortages. They spent a decade disarming the NHS, before sending it into the biggest fight it has ever faced. They cannot pretend that the NHS was well prepared. The problem for the Conservative party is that people are not stupid. Their memories are not that short. They know that the NHS was struggling to treat them on time before the pandemic, and they know who is to blame.

Access to GP Services and NHS Dentistry

Debate between Wes Streeting and Alex Sobel

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. This is the problem: they overpromise and underdeliver. If they will not hear it from me, Mr Speaker, let us remind ourselves of what some of the Secretary of State’s colleagues have said. The hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who is in the Chamber, said in Prime Minister’s questions only last week:

“At one of my surgeries, which has double the recommended number of patients per GP, the bowel cancer diagnosis of a 51-year-old father of four was missed and is now terminal.”—[Official Report, 15 June 2022; Vol. 716, c. 283-4.]

Earlier this month, the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) read a letter from a constituent to the Health Secretary. It said:

“Trying to get basic healthcare is a joke in Telford. Maybe I would be better off in…a third-world country”.

If the Secretary of State is not going to listen to us, he should at least listen to his own side. Before Conservative Members leap to the defence of their Government’s record, they should probably go back and check the record to make sure that they had not agreed with us in the first place.

As for dentistry, 2,000 dentists quit the NHS last year, around 10% of all dentists employed in England. It is an exodus under the Government’s watch. Four million people cannot access NHS dental care and cannot afford to go private either.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. My constituent, Ellie Cokeley, wrote to me. She works as a receptionist in a local dental practice and gets hundreds of calls a week from upset members of the public who are unable to find an NHS dentist. She said that it feels greatly unjust that the poorest in our society are being forced to pay huge amounts for vital dental care or, worse still, having to continue without any at all. Are the Government not failing people in this country when it comes to the care of their teeth? It is vital that we get more dentists in the system.

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Some places, such as Somerset, are dentistry deserts because the remaining NHS dentists are not taking on new patients.