It is good to see you in the Chair, Mr Sharma, and it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I thank the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for introducing the subject so comprehensively and eloquently, and I also thank her and her colleagues on the Petitions Committee for bringing it before us for debate in Westminster Hall. The Committee also did a great job in carrying out the survey that has helped inform some of the contributions that have already been made, and which I will come to shortly. I thank colleagues for those contributions, which have all been very powerful.
As colleagues have said, the starting point of this debate must be praising the international NHS staff. We have heard about the extraordinary contribution of those overseas nationals who come to join with UK nationals in order to keep our national health services “brilliant”—to use the word that the petitioners have used—and we have heard facts and figures about how significant the contribution of those overseas nationals is. Around one in six NHS staff members in England is non-British, and if I have understood the figures correctly, it is pushing on one in three doctors and one in four nurses. Overall, there are over 200,000 overseas NHS staff, coming from over 200 countries. GP practices are no different: we had a very constructive debate in Westminster Hall a couple of months back about some of the problems with keeping international medical graduates here as GPs, and the Minister took some points away from that debate. It will be interesting to see whether there has been any progress in the work being done to encourage more of those graduates to stay, because there is a gap in how the visa process works in relation to people wanting to stay on as GPs.
In particular, we should all recognise the extraordinary role that overseas workers in our NHS played during the pandemic, and indeed the sacrifices they made in protecting us from covid and treating those who suffered from it. I think I am right in saying that overseas nationals were disproportionately represented in the number of health workers who lost their lives during the pandemic.
The next part of the equation is, of course, that the NHS continues to face unparalleled challenges, particularly in terms of vacancies. Despite the huge contribution of the overseas workforce, figures also show that massive vacancy rates remain. As of September, NHS England had a growing vacancy rate of just shy of 12% for registered nursing staff: full-time equivalent staff vacancies in NHS trusts in England increased from about 133,100
in June to 133,400 in the quarter to September 2022, which I think is a five-year high. Overall, the vacancy rate in the quarter to September 2022 was 9.7%—again, a five-year high.
The important point, putting aside all the numbers, is what those vacancy rates mean in practice. Last year, a RCN survey found that only a quarter of nursing shifts have the planned number of registered staff on duty, which means that three quarters of shifts are going ahead with a shortage of nurses. In the ideal world, even if some nursing staff had to call in sick, we would have enough nursing staff to cover for them, but even with the full complement on, we are still short-staffed—we spend £3 billion every year on agency staff.
It is absolutely valid to say that the answer has to be partly about improving training and recruitment locally and ensuring that we can rely on the domestic workforce much more in the longer term. However, as the Health and Social Care Committee recently pointed out, overseas workers are essential to the health and social care system in the short term and in medium to long term: any move to shift to more domestic supply is likely to take time. We will have to continue to rely on overseas nationals filling those jobs in the years ahead.