I will be brief, Mr Deputy Speaker. I should declare that I am married to a doctor.
Staff are the No. 1 priority for the health service, and have been historically for this Government, so I will support the Government today, but somewhat through gritted teeth. I implore the Minister to include a few things in his 15-year review. I ask him to engage with the feeling of staff, which we have all heard about: if there are fundamentally not enough staff within the system, it is impossible for them to feel that they can do the job they went into medicine to do as well as they possibly can. I know his plans in this 15-year review will address some of that, but I hope he will also address the fact that there is a huge role to play for technology and for the increasing integration between health and social care. If more patients are stuck in hospitals because they cannot be sent on to the social care system, then we need more doctors to staff those hospitals.
I hope the Minister will consider those multiple facets in the review, and also consider that perhaps more important than anything else is how we retain staff. Even if we are putting more and more people into the beginning of a career pipeline, we will never be able to fill up that pipeline sufficiently if people, whether for pension-related reasons or a whole host of other reasons, are leaving more rapidly than we currently imagine they will in the planning.
That retention aspect has to be a hugely important part of the review. I hope that the possibility of addressing all those multiple factors will be core to what the Minister has been talking about. As others have said, I also hope he will be as transparent as possible within that, and that he or his Department will come to the House to
make those plans transparent. Fifteen years is good, and transcends the political horizon that so often derails good intentions for the NHS, but the more transparent we can be, and the more support we can give to recruitment, retention, technology, social care and a host of other issues, the less my teeth will be gritted as I support the Government today.