I rise to speak on amendment 10. I want to start by relaying a conversation that I had soon after being elected 11 years ago in Gloucester. I talked to the chief executive of a hospital trust—he has subsequently moved on—and asked him how many nurses a year we needed to replace those who have retired and resigned, and to cope with increasing demand, not just in the hospital trust but including district nurses and nurses to cover the whole panoply of our needs in the county of Gloucestershire. He explained that we needed roughly 400 a year at that time. I asked him how many we were training. He said that the University of the West of England trains around 120 graduates a year from its nursing outlet in Gloucester. How do we meet the gap, I asked, and he said, “Well, we advertise. We try to encourage people from London to
look for a change in their lifestyle and we recruit from abroad.” I asked him where that got us to. He said, “Well, it increases the numbers, but it never gets us enough. We struggle with a permanent shortfall of recruitment.”
Over the next few years, I worked on three things. The first was to support the Government push to create nursing associates. The second was to encourage the University of Gloucestershire to become a nursing teaching university and to submit an application to get pilot project status for the nursing associates’ training. Both of those came to pass. They were a credit to the Government, a credit to the university and a credit to the Nursing and Midwifery Council that supported them. None the less, we were, and are, still short; that gap has not been closed.
One other thing that I have done recently is to support the close engagement with the Government of the Philippines, who have kindly allowed us to carry on recruiting nurses from the Philippines to the United Kingdom during the pandemic. I ask everyone here to join me in paying tribute to the roughly 35,000 nurses from the Philippines who have made such a difference to our NHS. All those things have helped, but anyone who has played the role that all of us in this House have over the past two years will know that the people problem is the greatest problem that we have.
I chaired, first every week and now every two or three weeks, a meeting between all the MPs in Gloucestershire, the heads of the NHS trusts, public health and the county council. Time and again, the same issue comes up in a slightly different way: it is about people. Yes, we could build extra wards. Yes, we could convert offices into wards. Yes, we could build bed capacity, but we do not have more people to look after the patients in them. Yes, we have plenty of spaces in care homes, but we need to be able to send people back to their home from hospital, because that is how they recover best, and we do not have enough domiciliary care workers.
We have gone round and round for the past 10 or 11 years on this issue of staff—doctors in primary care surgeries, nurses everywhere and domiciliary care workers. I do not believe that we can resolve this problem until we start planning for the needs in different parts of the country and then working out how we can provide the training, the skills and the recruitment of individuals to make that happen. Of course it will not be perfect. Of course disasters such as the pandemic will make a bad situation much worse. We recognise that, but until we start that process, I do not believe that things will change. For as long as I am MP for Gloucester, I am absolutely certain that I will be having the same conversations about human resources—the people who deliver the care and health that all the people in my constituency and across the county and country need and deserve. It is not the best use of MPs’ time to constantly have to sit down with our health professionals in local NHS trusts to work out how we are going to mind the gap. That whole process has to be started from higher up, in the Department of Health and Social Care.
Today, we have an amendment that has enormous support not just from the Select Committee that my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) chairs, but from outside this House from the royal colleges, the NHS trusts and many others
beside. I am frustrated that the Government have so far not indicated whether they will accept the amendment. In their hearts, the Minister and his colleagues, all good people trying to do their best, recognise that this problem will have to be tackled. Perhaps part of the solution will be in the White Paper that we are all so eagerly waiting for and that we wish that we had been able to have a few days ago, before the votes last night, on which I supported the Government on the basis of trust. None the less, there comes a time when we have to say and vote for what we believe in. I do believe that we need this change and that the Government can and should do it, and I will vote for it.