Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of allocating additional funding to increase the number of domestic medical student places to ensure that the NHS has adequate staff to meet demand.

The Government has already committed to funding for universities to offer an extra 1,500 undergraduate medical school places for domestic students. The first 630 places were taken up in September 2018 and the remaining additional places will have been made available by universities by 2020/21. By 2020, five new medical schools will have opened in England to help deliver the expansion.

The interim NHS People Plan recognises that we will need more people working in the National Health Service over the next 10 years. We will review what further expansion in undergraduate medical places will be needed, in light of future plans made locally by sustainability and transformation partnerships and integrated care systems.