I commend the powerful contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western), for Wakefield (Simon Lightwood), for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), for Easington (Grahame Morris), for Blackburn, for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Putney (Fleur Anderson), as well as the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper). We also heard speeches from the hon. Members for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) and for Mansfield (Ben Bradley), although most of the parliamentary Conservative party seem to be absent today.
Before he became Chancellor, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) sent an email in which he addressed Labour’s NHS workforce plan. He said:
“Smart Governments”—
chance would be a fine thing with this lot—
“always nick the best ideas of their opponents.”
It has been interesting to watch those on the Government Benches tying themselves in knots to try to unpick our workforce strategy when they know that their Chancellor privately supports it and will, in all likelihood, be forced to swallow his pride and nick it sooner rather than later. They do so to try to mask the depressing truth: they have no plan and have not had one for years.
The NHS has a current shortage of 9,000 hospital doctors and 47,000 nurses. Staff are at breaking point and patients are being failed on an unprecedented scale. Some 7 million people—let that sink in—are waiting months and even years for treatment. Heart attack and stroke victims are routinely waiting over three hours for an ambulance. Patients are finding it impossible to get a GP appointment when they need one. The system is in crisis and the Government will not even admit it, let alone address it. I do not know what cloud cuckoo world the Minister who opened this debate is living in, but it is not the one that my constituents live in and I suspect it is not the one her constituents live in. The reality is that they have cut medical school places and wasted precious time trying to force through an unworkable and unethical Bill to sack striking nurses. They have had 13 years and the best they can do when faced with an acute workforce shortage is threaten to sack NHS staff, an idea that would be farcical if it were not so dangerous.
In the absence of a coherent Government strategy, there are already rumblings on the Tory Back Benches about the future of the NHS. Just a few months ago, a former Health Secretary said he thought that the NHS should start charging for A&E and GP visits. The absolute brass neck of it! To neglect a service for 13 years, fail to train the necessary staff, systematically mismanage it, and then pretend there is no alternative but to charge patients money to fix the mess they made. Not on Labour’s watch. The core principle of the NHS—a publicly funded service, free at the point of need—is non-negotiable. The problem is not the NHS; the problem is how it has been managed by this out-of-touch and out-of-ideas Government.
It is worth saying it over and again: Labour has a plan to build an NHS fit for the future. We would double the number of medical school places to 15,000 a year; double the number of district nurses qualifying each year; train 5,000 new health visitors; and create 10,000 more nursing and midwifery placements each year. We would train 8,500 mental health professionals and put hubs into the heart of our communities, so that people can access vital mental health treatment within a year. That would come alongside a 10-year strategy for change and modernisation within our NHS. It would be funded by abolishing the non-dom tax status, because patients need treatment more than the wealthiest need a tax break. I hope that in her response the Minister will give clarity on why the Government have decided to side with the non-doms rather than the nurses.