Wes Streeting – 2022 Speech on the NHS Workforce
The speech made by Wes Streeting, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the House of Commons on 6 December 2022.
I beg to move,
That this House recognises that the National Health Service is facing the worst workforce crisis in its history with a shortage of 9,000 hospital doctors and 50,000 nurses; condemns the Government’s failure to train enough NHS staff to tackle this crisis; regrets that, as a result, patients are finding it impossible to get a GP appointment, ambulance or operation when they need one; calls on the Government to end the 200-year-old non-domiciled tax status regime which currently costs taxpayers £3.2 billion a year; and further calls on the Government to use part of the funds raised to invest in the NHS workforce by doubling the number of medical training places, delivering 10,000 more nursing and midwifery clinical placements, training twice the number of district nurses per year and delivering 5,000 more health visitors to guarantee that the NHS has the staff to ensure every patient can access the care they need.
The NHS is facing the worst crisis in its history. Seven million people are waiting for NHS treatment, and they are waiting longer than ever before; 400,000 patients have been waiting for more than a year. Heart attack and stroke patients are waiting an hour for an ambulance, on average, when every minute matters. “24 Hours in A&E” is not just a TV programme; it is the grim reality facing patients in an emergency. Behind those statistics are people being held back from living their lives: people forced to give up work because they cannot stand the pain; young people, still bearing the scars of lockdown, unable to get the mental health support they need to step into adulthood; families losing loved ones for no other reason than that the NHS was unable to treat them in time.
My friend and colleague the shadow Leader of the House shared with me an email from one of her constituents. A patient with suspected cancer was urgently referred by his GP, which ought to mean being seen by a specialist within a fortnight. Four weeks later he had heard nothing. He phoned the hospital and was told, “two weeks currently means six weeks” and that he would be contacted, not seen, within the next two weeks. He has now had his appointment, during which the doctor identified cancerous cells. He has been told that he will wait up to eight months to have that cancer removed. He said that until waiting lists are down,
“more people will die unnecessarily from cancer. I hope not to be one of them.”
That is not uncommon. That is where we are. That is why Labour is today putting forward our plan to solve this crisis, make the NHS fit for the future, and get patients treated on time again.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
Yesterday I spoke to a paramedic who had been with a patient with sepsis, waiting for two and a half hours to be taken in. There were 98 calls at that same Yorkshire hospital waiting to go in. Are we now post-crisis and in complete breakdown, and do we need Labour’s plans to come in now, and not have to wait?
Wes Streeting
I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. As the Leader of the Opposition has said, the NHS is not on its knees; it is on the floor. How many times were we told during the pandemic that restrictions were needed to stop the NHS falling over? It has now fallen over, and for the first time in its history people no longer feel certain that, when they phone 999 or arrive at A&E, they will be seen in time. It is the first time in our country’s history that people have not felt confident that emergency medicine will be there for them when they need it.
The Conservatives blame the crisis in the NHS on everything from the weather to the pandemic, and even NHS staff. Of course there is no doubt that the pandemic has made things worse, but the Government—the Conservative party—sent the NHS into the pandemic with 100,000 staff shortages. They spent a decade disarming the NHS, before sending it into the biggest fight it has ever faced. They cannot pretend that the NHS was well prepared. The problem for the Conservative party is that people are not stupid. Their memories are not that short. They know that the NHS was struggling to treat them on time before the pandemic, and they know who is to blame.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
Is not the point that health is devolved across four different nations, which are each led by a different party? Does this mean that the pandemic has hit all health services, including across the western world? This is a rising tide of the problem of the pandemic and dealing with an ageing population. This is not party political at all, and it is remiss of the hon. Gentleman to try to make it that. What does he say to that?
Wes Streeting
I would say two things. As I have already said, I accept that the pandemic made the challenge right across the United Kingdom worse. I also accept that, in every part of the United Kingdom, the NHS is under severe pressure. I would say two things in response. First, even if some of our friends on the SNP Benches do not want to acknowledge it, there is no doubt that every part of the United Kingdom would be better off with a Labour Government and every part of the NHS in every part of the United Kingdom would be better off if there were a Labour Government, because the investment that we are proposing in NHS staff today would benefit countries right across the United Kingdom. [Interruption.] In response to the outgoing hon. Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow), do not say that politics does not make a difference. Do not expect the people to believe that somehow there was an inevitable sense of decline in the NHS. I am sure people remember that, when Labour was last in government, we delivered the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in history.
Paul Bristow (Peterborough) (Con) rose—
Wes Streeting
Is the hon. Member planning to cross the Floor? I look forward to hearing from him.
Paul Bristow
Certainly not. The hon. Member’s plan seems to be simply vote Labour—there is no detail to it and nothing else to it. I suggest that he looks at the good people of Wales, who suffer under a socialist healthcare system. They are certainly not very happy, are they?
Wes Streeting
I do not pretend that our plan is not vote Labour, but of course those are the means by which we get to better ends. What we propose today is the biggest expansion of the NHS workforce in history. I will explain how that will benefit patients across the country and how we will pay for it. I think that people in Peterborough, 2,788 of whom are waiting more than a month to see a GP, will welcome Labour’s plan for investment. That is why, after the next general election, Peterborough will have a Labour MP.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
I want to raise the case of my constituent, Mr Simpson, whose wife died last Tuesday after waiting 16 hours for an ambulance. On 29 November, his wife was confused. At 3 pm, he first called for an ambulance and was told that one might be sent and that he might hear from the service. At 6 pm, he rang the ambulance again. The person wanted to speak to his wife, but she was very confused and unable. He tried to give her a drink at 2.30 am; there was still no ambulance. His wife went to sleep, but she was still moving a bit. He fell asleep. He woke at 7.30 am and found that his wife was not moving; she had passed away. All the while they were still waiting for the ambulance to arrive. I do not believe for one moment that that happened because the ambulance service does not care. Does my hon. Friend agree that the service is desperately understaffed, desperately short of resources and in desperate need of adequate funding?
Wes Streeting
I thank my hon. Friend for raising that heartbreaking case. It is every family’s worst nightmare. All of us now know someone who is waiting for treatment. Many of us know someone who has called for an ambulance and waited for hours and hours—and, in some cases, given up on it and gone to hospital. I have spoken to ambulance service staff who, like many other staff across the NHS, feel a real sense of deep personal moral injury because they know that, despite their best efforts and busting a gut at work every single day, their best simply is not good enough because the system has collapsed. Ambulance turnaround times are not fast enough because A&E waiting times are too high. That is because people cannot see a doctor and the social care is not available, so the beds are full of people who are well enough to go home and would be better off at home. This is the problem in the NHS: the whole system is broken. I am afraid to say that political decisions made in this place by the Conservative party have led us to this tragic situation.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent case. At the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, the number of people still in hospital who could be discharged into social care amounts to three full wards. That is the situation that we have got to. It is a perfect storm, with ambulances queueing outside and people turning up at A&E because they cannot get to a GP. That will only ever be addressed if we also address staffing in our GP services to ensure that they can attract people who are offered Agenda for Change terms and conditions to alleviate the backlog. Does he agree that we need to invest in all the elements along that supply chain?
Wes Streeting
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is the tragedy of where we have got to on social care in particular. The Government have allocated half a billion pounds to alleviate pressure this winter, but not a penny of it has reached social care providers. Not a penny of it is currently being worked in action to try to deal with delayed discharges. I have no doubt whatsoever that one reason why it has taken so long from that commitment to getting money to the frontline is the constant churn of Ministers that we saw over the summer. The absolute circus that we saw in the Conservative party has had a direct impact on the competence of effective Government in this country. We now have ineffective Government, so even when the Government seek to do the right thing and allocate the resources, they cannot get the money out the door far enough because Ministers seem to change week in and week out.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the shadow Secretary of State for what he is saying. When it comes to staffing issues, one thing should clearly be done. Does he agree that part of the reason why we rely so heavily on agency staff is because our NHS staff have migrated to agency working, where there is less pressure, so the Government should spend less money on agency workers and give our NHS staff greater support and appropriate pay so that they can stay in the NHS?
Wes Streeting
I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman. I will come shortly to talk about industrial action, but this should be at the heart of the Secretary of State’s thinking. The demands from staff trade unions, whether on pay, terms and conditions or the wider pay machinery, should be seen not just as a negotiation with staff unions but as a retention issue. We are losing staff faster than we can recruit them in some places—especially in areas such as midwifery—and if we lose the staff that we have, even Labour’s plans to undertake the biggest recruitment in the NHS’s history would not be as effective as they would be if we kept staff in the service today. That is why I urge the Secretary of State to treat those NHS staff with respect, get their representatives around the table, and negotiate a solution.
I am aware that the situation in the NHS in Northern Ireland is the worst that we see throughout the United Kingdom. The shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), visited NHS services in Northern Ireland only recently. I have no doubt that we need to get effective governance back up and running again in Northern Ireland as well. I urge the Government to discharge their responsibilities in that area, too. Certainly, when Labour was last in government, I do not remember Labour Prime Ministers taking such a complacent, lackadaisical or indeed absent approach to the governance of Northern Ireland. I hope that we can see a breakthrough of the deadlock so that the people of Northern Ireland get the Government they deserve in Stormont, as well as the United Kingdom getting the Government it deserves here in Westminster.
Waiting lists were already at a record 4.5 million before the pandemic. Ambulances were taking longer than is safe to reach patients in an emergency before the pandemic. Patients were waiting longer than four hours in A&E before the pandemic. The 18-week guarantee for elective treatment had not been met for four years before the pandemic, and more patients have waited longer than two months to start their cancer treatment every year since 2010. From the moment the Conservatives entered power, things began to deteriorate. It is not just that the Conservatives did not fix the roof while the sun was shining; they blew off the roof and ripped up the floorboards, and then they wonder why the storm did so much damage.
Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
My hon. Friend mentioned cancer diagnosis rates. I believe he will be aware that one in four people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer dies within a month of their diagnosis, with 70% receiving no treatment at all because they die before they could be treated. Does he agree that cancer diagnosis rates are a disgrace and that early intervention, early diagnosis and early treatment are vital for people with all forms of cancer, particularly the most aggressive types such as pancreatic cancer, to have any chance of survival?
Wes Streeting
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One reason why this country has much poorer cancer outcomes than many comparable economies is precisely because of late diagnosis. I know from my own experience how vital early diagnosis can be for good cancer outcomes. I am terrified by the fact that, within those 7 million patients waiting in the elective backlog, there will undoubtedly be cases of undiagnosed cancer and other conditions. If the NHS had eyes on the patients, they would be detected faster, patients would receive treatment much more quickly and the outcomes would be better. One of the tragedies for the NHS is that, because we do late diagnosis, we get more expensive and less effective treatment. If we could diagnose faster, patients would get better outcomes and taxpayers better value for money. That is the kind of reform to the model of care that Labour would like to see.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
On diagnosis, access to GPs is also a vital part of the puzzle. Is it not terrible that the Government are not listening to GPs, who say they need a different visa system? They cannot recruit enough GPs into the system because the Government are so stuck with these immigration rules, and the Home Office does not want to change certain parts of the visa system?
Wes Streeting
I am grateful for that intervention. We are in the worst of all worlds on immigration and the NHS. The Government try to have it both ways. They talk tough on rhetoric, so we end up with a very bureaucratic, ineffective and costly system, but because they fail to invest in our own homegrown talent, they are over-reliant on immigration from other countries, including those who desperately need their own doctors and nurses. I do not think it is good enough, after 12 years of Conservative Government, that we are turning away bright potential doctors, nurses and allied health professionals because the Government cannot be bothered to pull their finger out and train our own homegrown talent. We need to see improvement, so we that can draw the best international talent and make the system smooth, efficient and effective, but it is also crucial that we train our own homegrown talent.
Turning to more of the Conservatives’ excuses—we have heard the excuses of the pandemic—let us now look at the excuse they are planning to deploy this winter. There is no denying that this winter could be the most challenging the NHS has ever faced. The Royal College of Nursing, for the first time in its more than 100-year history, is planning to undertake strike action. Just this lunchtime we got strike dates from Unison, the GMB union and Unite the Union. That raises the question: why are the Government not even trying to stop the strikes in the NHS from going ahead? Surely, when the NHS already lacks the staff it needs to treat patients on time, the Government ought to be pulling out all the stops, getting around the table and negotiating to stop industrial action? So why aren’t they?
The Secretary of State said in Health questions earlier that his door is open—as if we can just sort of wander in off the street into the Department of Health and Social Care, where there will be a cup of tea and a biscuit waiting, and he will be just waiting for the negotiations. That is not how this works. Everyone knows that is not how it works. He had a nice little meeting with unions after the summer, after Labour complained that we had not seen a meeting between a Secretary of State and the unions since the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid). Goodness me, we have had three Secretaries of State since then—and two of them are the Secretary of State on the Front Bench today. Why on earth are they not sitting around the table and conducting serious negotiations? I will tell you why, Mr Deputy Speaker: they know that patients are going to suffer this winter and they do not have a plan to fix it, so instead of acting to improve care for patients and accept responsibility, they want to use nurses as a scapegoat in the hope that they avoid the blame. We can see it coming a mile off. It is a disgusting plan, it is dangerous and it will not work.
If I am wrong, perhaps Conservative Members could explain why the Government are not trying to prevent the strikes from going ahead. Perhaps they could explain why the Secretary of State ignored all requests from the health unions for meetings and conversations this summer while the ballot was under way. Perhaps they could explain what the Government’s plan for the NHS is this winter. Perhaps they could explain why a Government source told The Times newspaper that
“Ministers plan to wait for public sentiment to turn against striking nurses as the toll of disruption mounts”.
They said the quiet bit out loud and they gave the game away.
What else would explain the unedifying and embarrassing spectacle of the chair of the Conservative party going on national television to accuse nurses of doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin? I should not have to make this point, but nurses are not traitors to this country. They bust a gut day in, day out to look after all of us. We clapped them during the pandemic and now the nurses are clapped out. They are overworked, overstretched and undervalued by this Government. Let me say to the chairman of the Conservative party that he would speak with greater authority on what is in Britain’s national interests if he did his patriotic duty in his own tax affairs.
When it comes to sending a message to Vladimir Putin, why does the burden consistently fall on the working people in Britain? Why is it that NHS staff must make huge sacrifices because of the invasion of Ukraine, yet people who live in Britain but do not pay their fair share of taxes here do not have to lift a finger? When it comes to paying the bills, the first and last resort of this Conservative Government is always to pick the pockets of working people, yet the enormous wealth of tens of thousands of non-doms is left untouched. They may blame covid, they may blame health professionals, they may even blame the weather, but it is 12 years of Conservative mismanagement and under-investment that has left the NHS without the doctors, nurses and staff it needs, and patients are paying the price.
I am sure every Member of this House, indeed everyone in the country, knows someone who has been let down when they needed healthcare in recent months. They all say the same thing: the NHS staff were brilliant, but there simply are not enough of them. There is no NHS without the people to run it, yet today there are more vacancies in the NHS than ever before: 9,000 empty doctor posts, 47,000 empty nursing posts, and midwives leaving faster than they can be recruited. There are 4,600 fewer GPs than there were a decade ago, and the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove admitted last year that the Government are set to break their manifesto promise to recruit them back.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I was looking at a message from a constituent this morning who told that he went to A&E having waited four weeks for a GP appointment. Does that not speak to a lack of investment in the NHS workforce over 12 years and a lack of adequate planning? I know how hard GPs work in my constituency, but the lack of GP availability to staff surgeries and provide those appointments is placing unneeded pressure on A&E. That is on this Government’s watch.
Wes Streeting
I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. As we see so often with this Government, they make promises but break them. They try to fool the public into thinking they are delivering more GPs—or indeed more police officers—when it was the Conservative party that cut them. They try to give with one hand, but they take with the other, and after 12 years people have had enough.
Of course, it is not only the promise to recruit more GPs that the Conservatives are breaking. We had the promise of 40 new hospitals, which the Secretary of State repeated today, yet in response to the question posed by the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), the Secretary of State said that of those 40 new hospital schemes
“five hospital schemes are in construction, two are now completed and we aim to announce the next eight by the end of this year.”
So, where are the other 25? Where are these 40 new hospitals? As far as I can tell, they exist only in the imagination of the former Prime Minister. Yet the script has not changed—Ministers are still here claiming 40 new hospitals.
When I visited Leeds with the shadow Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), I saw a vast pile of dirt where a new building was due to go up. We heard today that the Government cannot even negotiate an agreement with the hospital to get the site working and get the new facilities built. With every minute, every month and every year of delay construction costs are going up, so taxpayers are left in the worst of all worlds: broken promises, no 40 new hospitals, and paying through the nose for the ones that are being built because of Government incompetence.
We see the tragic consequences of the shortages and broken promises in the NHS. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) raised the tragic case today at Health questions of a five-year-old boy who had what his doctor described as the worst case of tonsilitis he had ever seen. He was turned away from hospital, with his parents told there were no beds and not enough doctors. His infection worsened and five-year-old Yusuf later passed away. His death certificate recorded the primary cause of his death as pneumonia and the secondary cause as tonsilitis. What kind of country are we living in when a five-year-old boy can die of tonsilitis? This is criminal.
I met Yusuf’s uncle, Zaheer Ahmed, last week, and I did not know what to say to that poor man and his grieving family, who lost that little boy in the most unimaginable circumstances. I invite the Secretary of State to meet Yusuf’s family to hear how that little boy was failed and to hear at first hand about some of their interactions with the NHS, which I thought were completely unacceptable and intolerable. On that note, I welcome the independent inquiry that has been committed to. That is really important for the family who have been failed in this heartbreaking case. We do not want to see more cases like that.
At the heart of the crisis in the NHS—as with so many of the problems facing our country—is a failure to plan. The NHS has not had a workforce plan since 2003. That would be unacceptable in a multinational company one one-hundredth the size of the NHS. The failure to plan means that short-term fixes are always favoured over what is in patients’ long-term interests. That is why the Government cut the nursing bursary and why, this summer, in the middle of the biggest crisis in the history of the NHS, they took the infuriating decision to cut a third of medical school places.
Dr Luke Evans
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Wes Streeting
The hon. Gentleman has been to medical school; does he think that it was a good idea to cut the number of places this summer?
Dr Evans
When we talk about Labour’s record on training, the hon. Gentleman may forget that, in 2007, the medical training application service ended up in judicial review. Many of my colleagues moved out of disciplines that they loved dearly because of Labour’s mess in making those plans. He has been speaking for almost half an hour, setting out his exposé of what is going on in the health service, but I am yet to hear a plan. I hope that he will spend the next half an hour telling us about the detailed plan of how we get to 10,000 new medical places, because when it comes to firms in hospitals, there is not enough space for medical students to get that experience, so I am looking for him to solve that problem.
Wes Streeting
The hon. Gentleman is not looking forward to me solving the problem half as much as I am looking forward to solving the problem. As far as I am concerned, the general election cannot come soon enough. I say to Government Members, “Be careful what you wish for”, because I intend, indeed, to set out Labour’s plans in detail. I am happy to stretch that to half an hour if that is where the demand takes us.
Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD) rose—
Wes Streeting
I give way to my Liberal Democrat friend.
Daisy Cooper
I am grateful for a number of the interventions, not least the most recent one. Is it not true that, as hospital trusts meet with regard to the new hospital programme today, they will discuss how big the new hospitals should be? Given that we need more space to train the doctors and nurses of the future, does the hon. Member agree that it would be criminal if they tried to cut corners by planning hospitals that are smaller than they need to be?
Wes Streeting
I wholeheartedly agree. I seemed to hear from the Health Secretary this afternoon a one-size-fits-all approach from the Government, as though every hospital’s needs will be the same and we can import a standardised model for every hospital site. I would be happy to be proven wrong, and I would be even happier if the Secretary of State got the ball rolling on some plans that are already agreed, and on which trusts have spent a significant amount of time and taxpayers’ money. I would be even more delighted if we got some of those hospitals open, but I would wager that when we get to the end of the Government’s life, we will not have seen anything like 40 new hospitals delivered or even in the pipeline.
Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a compelling case. I think I know where we could get some of the money from for training places, and perhaps he will agree. We forgo about £3.2 billion in revenue from non-doms every year. There are 68,000 non-doms, there or thereabouts, which works out at about £44,000 a non-dom. Does he think that he could do much with that?
Wes Streeting
My hon. Friend has led me neatly towards setting out Labour’s plans, which rely on people who come to this country and make Britain their home actually paying their taxes here. That is the right and fair thing to do, and I think people across the country would agree that we need nurses more than we need non-doms.
Charlotte Nichols
I have listened with interest to what has been said about the new hospital building programme, not least because we have been waiting for a new hospital in Warrington for a very long time. We recently opened the new Health and Social Care Academy at Warrington & Vale Royal College with some of our town deal fund money, but surely people need excellent, cutting-edge training facilities to go into in a hospital once they leave the college. The Government’s lack of progress on building us a new hospital in Warrington undermines some of the other excellent work that we are doing locally to try to train up the people we need to fill those workforce shortages.
Wes Streeting
I totally agree, and I heard of a really awful case in Warrington the other day. A Warrington resident who contacted me said that they waited 12 hours in agonising pain in accident and emergency before giving up and going home after midnight because she simply could not take it any more. The A&E department was so packed that she could overhear other patients’ conversations with clinicians, including sensitive medical information. Those are the kinds of conditions that patients are experiencing and in which the poor NHS staff have to work. It is simply unacceptable.
Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for being so generous in giving way. Does he agree that keeping the working environment safe is core to workforce planning, retaining the people who are trained and stopping spending eye-watering sums on agency nurses? He outlined many scenarios in which staff are forced to work in unsafe conditions. Does he agree that the core message coming from health unions is their desire to have appropriate staffing levels to provide the service on which all our constituents rely?
Wes Streeting
I strongly agree. In fact, I spoke to the general secretary of Unison last week. She said that as the unions look at safe staffing levels in critical services, in their determination to maintain patient safety in the event that industrial action goes ahead, they have found that on non-strike days, the NHS already operates at staffing levels below what the union would intend to operate on a strike day. That is an unbelievable state of affairs.
I am really worried about industrial action. Like patients across the country, I do not want industrial action to go ahead—it will mean ambulance delays, cancelled operations and even greater pressures on the NHS—but the tragedy is that we see the conditions that I just described every single day in the NHS. Pat Cullen from the Royal College of Nursing said, “We are striking for patients”. I have heard that line time and again from RCN members. It is partly about NHS staff’s pay and the conditions in which they work, but more than anything else, they are telling me that they voted for industrial action—some for the first time in their entire careers—because they have had enough and can no longer suffer the moral injury of going to work, slogging their guts out and going home petrified that, despite their best efforts, they still did not deliver the care that patients deserved. What an intolerable situation they find themselves in. Their backs are against the wall, and that is why the Government should negotiate.
Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that it is completely reprehensible for Government Ministers, when talking about potential pay strikes by nurses, to say that by going on strike, they are somehow enabling Putin’s regime?
Wes Streeting
That was a reprehensible thing to say and it shows how desperately the Government are scraping the barrel to make excuses for their negligence and mismanagement of the NHS.
As I said, I found it astonishing that this summer, in the middle of the biggest crisis in the history of the NHS, the Government took the infuriating decision to cut a third of medical school places. Thousands more straight-A students in Britain who want to help have been turned away from training to become doctors. It is like the clip of the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg saying in 2010 that there was no point in building new nuclear power stations because they would not come online until 2022. This country needs Governments who think beyond short-term electoral cycles and put the long-term interests of the country first. That is the approach that Labour would take, but it has been sadly missing for the past 12 years.
Just as the Government failed to build our energy security, leaving us exposed to Putin’s war in Ukraine, they failed to train the staff the NHS need, leaving us exposed as the pandemic struck. Their failure to prepare has left us in the ludicrous situation in which UK universities are now offering medical degrees only to overseas students. That’s right: the Government are refusing to allow bright British students to achieve their dreams of becoming doctors, so Brunel University is forced to take exclusively students from overseas. The Chair of the Select Committee on Education, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), has warned that there is a real risk that medical schools will
“only train overseas students who go off and get jobs elsewhere”.
What a criminal mismanagement of our higher education system. What a failure to plan to meet our staffing needs with our own home-grown talent.
Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent point. Given that there were nearly 30,000 medical school applications last year from British students who really want to study medicine, does he agree that it is absolutely disgraceful that the Government have a cap of 7,500? That shows that we are not investing in our workforce or in home-grown British doctors. It is appalling that the Government cannot see the importance of that.
Wes Streeting
I wholeheartedly agree. To deal with that problem—and, indeed, to satisfy the demands of the Conservative party, which looks to Labour for answers—we are putting forward a plan today to solve the crisis, to bring down waiting times, to get patients the treatment they need and to build a healthy society.
Where the Conservatives are holding the best and brightest students back from playing their part in the health of our nation, Labour will unleash their talent in the NHS: we will double medical school places, training 15,000 doctors a year so that patients can see a doctor when they need to. Where the Conservatives have left nurses working unsafe hours, unable to spend the time they need with patients to provide good care—where the Conservatives have left the NHS so short of midwives that expectant mothers are turned away from maternity units that do not have the capacity to deliver their child—Labour will act: we will train 10,000 more nurses and midwives every year.
We will go further. The way we deliver healthcare has to change. For many patients, a hospital is not the best place to be, yet in the past 12 years all the other parts of our health and care service have been eroded by underinvestment. When our society is ageing and people increasingly want to be cared for in the comfort of their own home, surrounded by their loved ones, why have four in 10 district nursing posts been cut? Labour is proud to have district nursing at the heart of our plans to modernise the NHS, and we will double the number of district nurses qualifying every year.
Many colleagues across the House have campaigned for years on the importance of the early years of a child’s development. All the evidence says that the first 1,000 days of a child’s life are vital to their development and life chances, yet the number of health visitors has been cut in half since 2015. Labour will ensure that every child has a healthy start to life, training 5,000 more health visitors. That is what our motion would deliver.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
The hon. Member raises children and early intervention, but one area he has not touched on is the tidal wave of cases relating to children and young people’s mental health. As we all see in our casework every week, children and young people who have not been treated early get worse and worse and therefore get referred to acute services. In the past year, referrals to child and adolescent mental health services have gone up almost 25% and consultant psychiatrist numbers have come down. In terms of early intervention, we are not seeing enough mental health support in our schools. In Richmond, we cannot recruit clinical psychologists even though we have the money to do so. Does the hon. Member agree that we really need to focus on the future of this country—our children—by training more psychiatrists, counsellors and psychologists?
Wes Streeting
I totally agree. We have had lots of perfectly good speeches from Conservative Prime Ministers over the past 12 years, and we have had more than our fair share of unbelievably bad Conservative Prime Ministers over the same period. One thing that each of those speeches has had in common is warm rhetoric and no delivery. We are not prepared to make the same mistake, so although it is not on today’s Order Paper, I am pleased to confirm that my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition has announced a mental health pledge that will mean 8,500 more mental health professionals being recruited. It will enable us to provide mental health hubs in every community, dedicated mental health support in every school and the aim of guaranteeing treatment within a month.
Our pledge will be transformational to mental health support in this country. It will particularly benefit young people, whose mental health and wellbeing have borne the brunt of the pandemic. It will really help to free up capacity for GPs and accident and emergency departments, which are increasingly seeing mental ill health cases coming through their door because the specialist support that people need is unavailable. Our plan, like our motion on today’s Order Paper, is fully costed and fully funded and will make a real difference to patients. Just as the Conservative party is welcome to steal Labour’s NHS workforce pledge, it is very welcome to steal our mental health plan too.
As well as recruiting the doctors, nurses and allied health professionals we need, we also need to keep the staff we have.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
Why does my hon. Friend think Government Members are so keen on protecting non-dom status? What is the interest there?
Wes Streeting
That is an excellent question that the Secretary of State is really well placed to answer. It is not as if people in Downing Street do not know what non-dom status is or how it is currently accessed. I do not know whether the Chancellor’s reluctance to abolish non-dom status is because he does not want bad relations with his next-door neighbour. We have all been in that situation—everybody needs good neighbours—but I think a little neighbourly discomfort on Downing Street is a price worth paying to improve the healthcare available to people on streets up and down the rest of the country.
We need to keep the staff we already have. On a visit to a hospital recently, I spoke to a nurse about whether she was planning to vote for industrial action. She said yes: pay was an issue, but what really motivated her decision was the stress, the burnout and going home at the end of the day with the moral injury of worrying that she had not delivered the care patients deserve because she was too overstretched. I asked her what would make the most difference. She said, “I just want to know that the cavalry is coming—that it is worth staying in the job because things are going to get better.” She knows how long it takes to train nurses—she has been through it herself—and how long it takes to train doctors. She can accept that, but what she cannot accept is a future in which, because we did not act today or because the incoming Government did not act after the general election, she is still working understaffed shifts in overstretched hospitals a decade down the line.
Labour’s message to NHS staff is that the cavalry is coming with Labour. We will train a new generation of doctors, nurses and midwives so that staff are not driven out of the service and patients are treated on time. Of course more can be done to keep staff from leaving. We have been calling on the Government for months to fix the perverse incentives in doctors’ pensions that are forcing them into early retirement. The Government have just launched a consultation that might lead to changes in spring 2023. What good is that when the NHS is on the cusp of the worst winter crisis in its history?
The Government announced in the autumn statement that, for the first time ever, they would count the number of staff the NHS need—a truly groundbreaking act! Counting the number of people we need is a good start, but Labour has committed to an independent workforce body that will look at retention and better professional development so that staff can build and progress their careers in the health service. With the number of care workers falling for the first time, where is the Government action to stop the exodus of care workers to places like Amazon? Providing fair pay and terms and conditions for care workers is not only the just thing to do, but one of the best things that the Government can do to ease pressure on the NHS.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)
Is there not a need for urgent thinking about the impact of inflationary pressures on all the UK’s health systems in the UK? According to a report published yesterday by the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University, inflation will eat into the Welsh budget to the tune of £800 million next year and £600 million in 2024-25. Health is at the heart of the Welsh budget, and this will inevitably have a huge impact on health delivery in Wales. I am not sure what the English figures are, but the cash-terms increases in the autumn statement are highly unlikely to compensate for the inflationary pressures that will also affect the English health budget.
Wes Streeting
The hon. Gentleman is right: inflation is a big problem, and it is a problem made in Downing Street. We are all paying a very heavy price for more than a decade of Conservative mismanagement of the economy. Yes, we can all point to the spectacular success that was the mini-Budget, which crashed the economy and left everyone picking up the pieces, but even that does not explain more than a decade of low growth, low productivity and higher taxes. That is where the Conservative party has left us, and that is why it is not just a change of NHS policy we need, but a change of economic policy. Goodness me, the Conservatives have had enough goes at it. They have had enough Chancellors this year. Even The Spectator has lauded the shadow Chancellor as the Chancellor of the year, because she has the plan that the country needs. Business leaders know it, we know it, the country knows it, and I suspect that even Conservative Members know that it is true.
Let me now turn to our NHS workforce plan. When I say that it is a serious plan, the House should not just take my word for it. It has been endorsed by the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and Universities UK. It has widespread and cross-party support. I was particularly pleased by the support expressed by one correspondent, who wrote in September:
“I very much hope the government adopts this on the basis that smart governments always nick the best ideas of their opponents. They also ditch the bad ones of their predecessors such as blocking an enlightened amendment to the Health Act that would have sorted out workforce planning”.
I should like to thank the Chancellor for his endorsement. I was with him in the Lobby to support that NHS workforce amendment when Conservative Members, no doubt including the Secretary of State, were voting the other way. May I invite the Secretary of State to use that quote in any future negotiations in which he engages at the Treasury? I am just trying to be helpful.
While the Secretary of State is there, perhaps he could suggest that the Treasury take a proper look at the non-dom tax status. The Chancellor admitted after the latest Budget that his team had not even calculated how much the tax status was costing the Treasury and how much scrapping it would raise, at the same time as expecting us to believe that it would not work and that the sums produced by independent academics would not add up, although he had not even bothered to commission Treasury sums of his own.
Politics is about choices. The Conservatives are choosing to protect non-dom tax status, benefiting a few wealthy individuals, while millions of people cannot get a GP appointment or an operation when they need one. The Conservatives are choosing to protect non-dom tax status, benefiting a few wealthy individuals, while millions of people are left waiting in agony on NHS waiting lists. And, of course, the Conservatives are choosing to protect non-dom tax status, benefiting a few wealthy individuals, when they know that it is not just the health of the nation that is being harmed by record NHS waiting lists, but the health of our economy. Patients need treatment more than the wealthiest need a tax break. Those who live in Britain should pay their taxes. The Labour party is clear about where we stand: we need nurses, not non-doms.
We have a plan. The Conservatives do not. We have a record of delivering in government. The Conservatives do not. It is not just the House that faces a choice today; at the next election, the country will face a choice between more of the same with the Conservatives and the fresh start that Britain needs with Labour.
