NHS Workforce Expansion
Debate between Wes Streeting and Helen Whately(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Helen Whately
A responsible Government take a responsible approach to funding our public services, including the NHS. Later I will come to exactly the point about the Opposition’s proposals to use that funding pot again and again for the health service.
Coming to social care and international recruitment, we have put care workers on the shortage occupation list. As a result, social care employers have already been able to offer care worker visas to more than 34,000 people. I welcome international nurses joining our nursing and midwifery register, and I make no apology for continuing to encourage bright and talented international doctors to come and work in the NHS. In fact, that is the very idea of the points-based immigration system that we have so successfully implemented.
As well as recruiting the best and the brightest, it is vital that we retain them. Ultimately, our goal is to make sure that the NHS is one of the very best places to work in the world; both my parents were NHS doctors and, believe me, I have had plenty of conversations about why sometimes it is not. What is most frustrating is when the system prevents them from giving people the very best care.
It is not simply all about pay, as Opposition Members might have us believe. The hon. Member for Ilford North talked about nursing pay, but he will understand that we are currently in talks and now is not the moment to play politics with this issue. We are pleased that the Royal College of Nursing has paused strike action. We have no doubt that both sides are committed to finding a fair and reasonable settlement—one that recognises the vital role that nurses and nursing play in the health service, the wider economic pressure facing the United Kingdom and the Prime Minister’s priority to halve inflation.
Helen Whately
I will not, as the hon. Gentleman had a long time at the Dispatch Box.
Our talks are focused on pay, terms and conditions and enhancing productivity. We are hopeful that we will find a pragmatic way forward. We also know that pensions and the interaction between pension, pay and taxes matter. In general practice, we are consulting on changes to the pension scheme so that clinicians who want to stay in the NHS will not have to worry that they might lose out financially. Going beyond pay, from my conversations with staff I know the importance of their day-to-day experience at work, and of having the resources and the support that they need. We will continue to press ahead with supporting the mental health and wellbeing of NHS staff.
As we work to support our workforce, we must move beyond discussion just about numbers and pay. In the NHS we have one of the largest workforces in the world, with many hundreds of organisations within it. It is an entire ecosystem. We have an incredible opportunity to do things differently at real scale, with bold new ways of working. Take our surgical hubs, which are getting hundreds of thousands more patients quicker access to procedures. Community diagnostics centres are bringing diagnostic care nearer to home without the need even to visit acute hospital sites.
We are empowering our community pharmacists to do more. We have already introduced a range of new clinical services in community pharmacy, including blood pressure checks and minor illness referrals from GPs and NHS 111. This year we will introduce more services, including a pharmacy contraception service. Just as these innovations are good for patients, they are good for the workforce too, freeing up more time for colleagues to do what they do best.
On training, the Opposition motion calls for an expansion of medical school places. I will not pre-empt the upcoming NHS workforce plan, but I can say that it will set a clear direction for our workforce, making sure that we have the right people with the right skills in the right places over the next 15 years. It was this Government—through the Chancellor when he was Health Secretary—that expanded medical school places from around 6,000 each year to more than 7,500—a 25% increase in just three years. In fact, that was such a substantial expansion that it saw the creation of five new medical schools in England, one of which in east Kent I visited earlier this month. There, they are not only training more future doctors but innovating in how they do so, preparing medical students to work in the NHS of the future.
Equally, it is not for me to tell the House what will be in the spring Budget. In the current fiscal environment there are far fewer public spending elements that can be traded off against health and care spending compared with previous decades. Yet even when faced with tough choices in the autumn, including very real pressure on public finances, this Government made a deliberate choice to prioritise health and social care, including investment of an additional £14 billion over the next two years.
When it comes to the spring budget, I can guarantee to the House that our sums will add up, unlike those of the hon. Member for Ilford North, who seems to be banking on what he believes will be an inexhaustible pot of non-dom taxation, including for his uncosted and unfunded reorganisation of primary care. He did not mention that much earlier—a policy so roundly mocked by the sector that we woke up to it on the “Today” programme and found it had been put to bed by “Newsnight”.
Since the business investment relief scheme, introduced in 2012, non-doms have invested more than £6 billion in the UK. They play their part in supporting the vital public services that we all depend on. Even a former Labour shadow Chancellor has said that scrapping non-doms would probably end up costing Britain money—to be fair, that seems to be the Labour party’s main objective, with £90 billion of unfunded spending commitments to date, and counting.