NHS Workforce Expansion

Debate between Wes Streeting and Yasmin Qureshi

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it is why current staff in the NHS are right to say that retention is urgent and that we need measures from the Government immediately to deal with retention. By definition, if we have a shortage of staff, retention is not enough, and that is why Labour has put forward a fully costed, fully funded plan for the biggest expansion of NHS staff in history.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the £1.3 billion that the NHS spent on agency staff last year could have been used to recruit proper, full-time NHS staff?

[Wes Streeting]

I wholeheartedly agree. It is why we are in the worst of all situations: the shortage of staff means not only that patients are receiving poorer care, but that we are paying over the odds as taxpayers for the Conservatives’ failure to recruit and retain the staff we need.

We are not alone in thinking that the biggest expansion of NHS staff in history and doubling the number of medical school places is the right solution. Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, has rightly said that we need greater investment in training to stop excellent British students being turned away. The Royal College of Physicians has called for medical school places to be doubled, and now the NHS is formally asking the Government to fund it. Why are the Government refusing to fund a doubling of medical school places, which the NHS and the Royal College of Physicians say is necessary, and which patients can see through experience is desperately necessary?

NHS Workforce

Debate between Wes Streeting and Yasmin Qureshi

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree. In fact, I spoke to the general secretary of Unison last week. She said that as the unions look at safe staffing levels in critical services, in their determination to maintain patient safety in the event that industrial action goes ahead, they have found that on non-strike days, the NHS already operates at staffing levels below what the union would intend to operate on a strike day. That is an unbelievable state of affairs.

I am really worried about industrial action. Like patients across the country, I do not want industrial action to go ahead—it will mean ambulance delays, cancelled operations and even greater pressures on the NHS—but the tragedy is that we see the conditions that I just described every single day in the NHS. Pat Cullen from the Royal College of Nursing said, “We are striking for patients”. I have heard that line time and again from RCN members. It is partly about NHS staff’s pay and the conditions in which they work, but more than anything else, they are telling me that they voted for industrial action—some for the first time in their entire careers—because they have had enough and can no longer suffer the moral injury of going to work, slogging their guts out and going home petrified that, despite their best efforts, they still did not deliver the care that patients deserved. What an intolerable situation they find themselves in. Their backs are against the wall, and that is why the Government should negotiate.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that it is completely reprehensible for Government Ministers, when talking about potential pay strikes by nurses, to say that by going on strike, they are somehow enabling Putin’s regime?

[Wes Streeting]

That was a reprehensible thing to say and it shows how desperately the Government are scraping the barrel to make excuses for their negligence and mismanagement of the NHS.

As I said, I found it astonishing that this summer, in the middle of the biggest crisis in the history of the NHS, the Government took the infuriating decision to cut a third of medical school places. Thousands more straight-A students in Britain who want to help have been turned away from training to become doctors. It is like the clip of the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg saying in 2010 that there was no point in building new nuclear power stations because they would not come online until 2022. This country needs Governments who think beyond short-term electoral cycles and put the long-term interests of the country first. That is the approach that Labour would take, but it has been sadly missing for the past 12 years.

Just as the Government failed to build our energy security, leaving us exposed to Putin’s war in Ukraine, they failed to train the staff the NHS need, leaving us exposed as the pandemic struck. Their failure to prepare has left us in the ludicrous situation in which UK universities are now offering medical degrees only to overseas students. That’s right: the Government are refusing to allow bright British students to achieve their dreams of becoming doctors, so Brunel University is forced to take exclusively students from overseas. The Chair of the Select Committee on Education, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), has warned that there is a real risk that medical schools will

“only train overseas students who go off and get jobs elsewhere”.

What a criminal mismanagement of our higher education system. What a failure to plan to meet our staffing needs with our own home-grown talent.