First, we passed the Care Act 2014, which put in place the legislative foundations for the proposals that we are now going to fund. Secondly, I happen to agree with the hon. Gentleman: the social care system has needed more money for some time. That is why it is so extraordinary that his party is to vote against this Bill.
If we are going to take £12 billion a year out of people’s pockets, we need to avoid falling into three traps—and I say this as someone who has fallen into more traps in this policy area than anyone else in this House. The first trap that we need to be careful of is the workforce. If we put an extra £8 billion into the NHS but we do not have £8 billion-worth of additional doctors and nurses to do the extra treatments, the risk is that that money will hit the ground without touching the sides. That is why we need a workforce plan.
The Health Foundation says that the backlog will require 4,000 more doctors and 18,000 more nurses, but we have not had any workforce plan from the DHSC. I suspect that in the short term we will have to relax all
the immigration requirements for doctors and nurses. That will not be great for developing countries, but it may well be our only choice. In the medium term, the best suggestion is what my Select Committee and many others have proposed: we should give Health Education England the statutory responsibility to produce independent workforce estimates and create a discipline, a bit like the OBR does for Budgets, to make sure that we are training enough doctors and nurses. That is the first trap.