As you already are, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I could not resist.
The problem is that unless we face up to the scale of the workforce challenge, the Government simply will not deliver the shorter waiting times that patients need until they break out of their straitjacket. They should start today; otherwise, patients will be left wondering why they are paying more in taxes but waiting longer for care.
Government Members may argue that we do not need Lords amendment 29, because there is a planned update to “Framework 15”, Health Education England’s 15-year strategic framework for workforce planning—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) cannot wait; she is watching her inbox daily, waiting for it to arrive. The truth is that this is inadequate. Previous iterations of the framework have not quantified the staffing numbers needed. The Secretary of State was recently unable to confirm when he appeared before the Health and Social Care Committee that the revised framework will set out the required numbers of staff. The truth is that the recent past is littered with promises of workforce strategies and frameworks that have either not materialised or failed to deliver the action needed.
Let me turn to the Minister’s claim that we have record numbers of doctors and nurses—it is today’s equivalent of, “You’ve never had it so good.” We all know—he knows this very well—that the population is growing and ageing, and as it does so, we need the numbers of nurses, doctors and carers to keep up. This is a question not just of recruitment, but of retention. When I ask frontline staff, “What would make the
single biggest difference to your morale? What would be the thing that keeps you going even though you are exhausted, stressed and burned out?”, their answer is very simple: they just want to know that the cavalry is coming and that significant numbers of staff will be recruited to help provide the support they need. Their greatest fear is that the people who have slogged their guts out to get us through the pandemic will be left alone as they try to help the NHS to recover from the pandemic and from the problems that existed before it. If we are not careful, we will risk losing those staff, creating even greater pressures—a greater cost to patient care, a greater cost to patient safety and a greater cost in recruiting and training new doctors and nurses. With the best will in the world, and with the best training available at our brilliant medical schools, doctors and nurses take years to develop the skills and experience to make them outstanding clinicians. Those are the people we risk losing at this very moment.
While I have the opportunity, may I say to the Minister that I cannot understand why there are 791 medical school graduates who still do not have a junior doctor post? These people are qualified, they are ready and there is a shortage—get them to work!
6.15 pm
Lords amendment 30 is a power grab, pure and simple. Does the Secretary of State really believe that he knows better than those who are working on the ground in our NHS? The Bill includes a requirement that Ministers be informed of every single service change and every single reconfiguration, and the Secretary of State will then decide whether each should go ahead. They should be careful what they wish for.
As the right hon. Member for South West Surrey knows, when I was first elected to this House and he was Secretary of State, I would not stop badgering him about the future of King George A&E. Every time I did, he batted it back to the local NHS trust and said that it was a local decision driven by clinical need. In the end, we won and we did not need him, but imagine the political pain that I would have inflicted on him if I had known that he was the one who held the pen and held the power. I say to the current Secretary of State: be very careful what you wish for.
The new powers, I am afraid, are part of a theme running through the Bill of more powers being placed in the hands of Government—a theme that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has described as “disturbing”. The Government have gone from wanting to be the great liberators of the NHS under the right hon. Lord Lansley—who has gone through a rather entertaining damascene conversion in the other place—to wanting to rule with an iron fist under Comrades Javid and Argar.
The powers are completely unnecessary. They risk causing a decision-making logjam and dragging national politics into local decisions about services. For reforms intended to reduce bureaucracy, they could create a significant new bureaucratic burden.