My hon. Friend neatly makes the point that I was hoping to make next. I will elaborate on the brilliance of his insight and simply say that when we think about waiting times it is very important that it is not just a debate about money. I appreciate that the Bill is about money, and that is why amendments have been tabled about money, but I want to give the example of the annual cycle of winter crises that we seem to have in the NHS now. I looked up the figures and, over the past five years that I was doing the job, in the first year I gave the NHS £300 million to avoid a winter crisis; in the second year, £400 million; in the third year, £700 million; in the fourth year, £400 million; and in the fifth year, £400 million. In four of those five years, we still had a winter crisis. That is because in the end it is not about money as much as it is about capacity.
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If we do not have the additional doctors and nurses available to provide the care that we want to be provided, money will disappear very quickly and we will not see any benefit for it. If we want to get back to those waiting time standards—and no one would want to do that more than I do—we have to look at the issue of capacity, and in two areas in particular.
First, are we actually training enough additional doctors and nurses? I introduced some big increases—a 25% increase in doctors being trained—and of course because it takes seven years to train a doctor, they will not start to come through until towards the end of this Parliament. The Government have announced a big increase in the number of nurses that they want to recruit, but training new nurses takes three years. Looking at whether those numbers are right will be absolutely essential if we are to break the cycle of winter crises. Essential to that is to ensure that we have an independent estimate of the number of doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and allied health professionals that the NHS actually needs and a Government who sign up to training those numbers.
If that number is the result of a negotiation between the Treasury and DHSC, the Treasury will negotiate those numbers down because it always sees training more doctors and nurses as building up a cost pressure for the future. Actually, it is the opposite: if we do not train enough doctors and nurses, the NHS ends up having to pay extortionate agency rates and locum doctor rates, and it ends up costing the NHS more. I would like an answer to the question of whether we are even now training enough doctors and nurses, and I would like to know what the NHS actually believes is the answer to that question. I would also like to know that the Government are committed to doing that, and I very much hope that when we have the people plan, there will be an independently audited projection of the number of doctors and nurses required.
The final point I wanted to make is about—