Health and Social Care Workforce

I thank the Chair of the Education Committee for being a guest at yesterday’s session with the medical director of NHS England in our workforce special. He is right. The Prime Minister told me at the Liaison Committee, and the medical director said yesterday, that it will take time to scale up. Yesterday, the GMC chief executive talked about training capacity in scaling up the medical places. That is right and needs to be done. However, where the medical schools are ready—even with fairly modest numbers—for September ’24, it would be an incredibly good signal of intent from the Government to allow them to start then. The money is front-loaded, so the fiscal cycle should allow that to happen. Knowing my hon. Friend, he will not let this one go. I thank him for raising it.