My hon. Friend is absolutely right. These issues are about not just doctors but all associated health professionals, allied health professionals and indeed the social care workforce. It is important to note that they predate the pandemic. That is why, when I was doing the job of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, I set up five new medical schools and increased the number of doctor, nurse and midwife training places by a quarter, but we need to go further.
When the number of clinicians we train is decided by haggling between the Department of Health and the Treasury in a spending round, there is always the risk that it will be eclipsed by more short-term considerations. The truth is that we have a short-term emergency with workforce burnout, so I urge my right hon. Friend to look at the simple and sensible solution proposed by the Health Foundation and all the royal colleges in The Times today to legislate for Health Education England to have a statutory responsibility to publish annual independent workforce projections across the health and care system for the next five, 10, 15 and 20 years. That would show how many training places are needed, which would start to tackle this problem and the obscenity of spending £6 billion every year on locum doctors and agency workers. That cannot be the best use of funds.
Frontline health and care workers are exhausted. They know that there is not an instant solution, because they know it takes three years to train a nurse and seven years to train a doctor, but we can at least give them the reassurance that there is a long-term plan in place. That is not in the Bill, but it needs to be. Given the dedication that we have seen from health and care staff over the last year, it is the very least that we owe them.
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