My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, who has tabled a very useful amendment, Amendment 52, to which I was pleased to attach my name. I will speak chiefly to Amendment 55 in my name, but I will also
look at the whole range of Amendments 52 to 55, which are all on variations of forms of reports. It might be useful for us to consider whether we can bring this together for Report. There is clearly a desire, coming from a number of different directions, to see a reporting and scrutiny mechanism for the Bill.
I will, however, briefly comment on and commend Amendment 19 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, which refers to consulting consumer interests. That is particularly interesting when we look back to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, at Second Reading, and the concerns about the way in which many of our professional services are failing to meet the needs both of those using them and of broader society. There is something useful in the suggestion from the noble Baroness that would be interesting to take forward.
I will now address Amendments 52 to 55, on the issue of reporting back. There has been great discussion in this Committee about the complexity of the Bill, the difficulty of fully understanding its impacts and, indeed, the fact that, with its range of Henry VIII powers, much of the detail will come in later regulation of which we have very limited or no democratic oversight.
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There is a real argument for saying that we need an assessment point, whether it is one or two years or whatever, at which this House and the other place have a chance to assess the impact of the Bill, see where problems might have arisen and how they might be dealt with them. There is an underlying issue here that addresses much more broadly the functioning of the whole UK Government. I often hear from NGOs and businesses that the Government do things and never assess the impact of what they have done or whether what they are doing should be changed. A similar complaint that we often hear is that the Government or our structures fund pilot projects and sometimes we get assessments of them but even when those assessments are brilliant, they never get rolled out. We have some real structural problems with the way in which the Government work. At least if we built into the Bill an modest assessment and reporting-back process, we could perhaps set a model—a standard, even; let us think big—that could apply to future Bills and operations of the Government.
I come to the precise details of Amendment 55 on which I shall mostly focus and shall set out why it contains the reporting provisions proposed. Before doing so, I have to offer my thanks to the Public Bill Office, which offered its expert assistance in putting this amendment together. I should say that what is listed is not by any means exactly right but I hope that it is a starting point for discussion of some broader issues.
Amendment 55 calls for a report to be made within two years and at five-year intervals thereafter. It seeks to put the Bill in the context of how professional services are provided. We heard from the Minister when he outlined the Bill that addressing skills shortages is an important part of its aims. Proposed new paragraph (1)(a) is saying, “Let’s check to see how the Bill is actually doing”. I have set out the
“medical, construction and food production sectors.”
We can argue about them. The reasons for including the medical sector have been well canvassed and discussed by other noble Lords. We are in a situation in which there are nearly 35,000 unfilled nursing vacancies. In Sheffield, we are about to lose a much-loved GP surgery because it is simply impossible to find another GP partner for it. So including the medical sector is obvious.
I should also point out that the construction industry is included, which addresses the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Palmer. I spent a great deal of time recently talking to the Federation of Master Builders, particularly in the context of the hope that we will eventually have a workable retrofitting policy greatly to speed up the work of making our housing stock fit for the 21st century and the climate emergency. That will require an enormous number of skills, and we severely lack highly skilled people. Continental Europe, where there are passive house standards, high levels of building stock and retrofitting has been happening place for decades, is where the skills often exist. The Federation of Master Builders represents many small and medium-sized builders. How will they be able to get those skilled people in? What blocks or speed-in might the Bill offer?
Proposed new paragraph (1)(b) addresses a point that I raised at Second Reading. The Bill addresses only one side of the story on professional qualifications. We find that people are qualified to work in the UK but will we let them in, even if they have jumped through the hoops to find themselves qualified? I think here of the cases that we saw, particularly before the pandemic, although some of the issues have been dealt with in the short term in the light of the pandemic. We found that physiotherapists and nurses in particular were not earning enough money to earn the right to remain in the UK, even after working here for a number of years. They were facing being forced to leave the UK, while the NHS trusts that employed them were flying people around the world to recruit more people to fill the very posts from which we were throwing people out. We were seeing a situation in which the costs of recruitment were significant, particularly international recruitment, while we were losing the skills of people who had been here for a number of years and had acquired knowledge and understanding of the roles that they were being asked to fill during that time. It is therefore important that we look at the interaction between immigration and the professional qualification rules.
Paragraph (1)(c) of the proposed new clause looks at a broader issue and questions an aspect of Government policy. We have heard often from the Government that “We want to attract the best and brightest from around the world to the UK.” We are talking about something that has been going on for decades. Thinking particularly about medical professionals, we are taking people from the global south, who have been very expensively trained in countries that are grossly short of professionals themselves. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, referred to this in an earlier group. We are taking people and bringing them here, and not training enough people ourselves. There are two sides to this and proposed new paragraph (1)(d) addresses whether the demand
for doctors, nurses and associated health professionals is being met by training in the UK. There is a very important figure there to be looked at and considered.
As a gesture of good will, I am not going to make any reference to any ongoing debates anywhere else. I am simply going to say that we surely have a responsibility, given how much we have drawn on the resources of the global south in the past, to support the training of professionals in the global south, the professionals that are urgently needed there, and some of whom we will undoubtedly continue to see working in the UK. One of the things I stress is that we need to acknowledge that professionals will want to move around the world for personal and personal development reasons. We need to train more than we need because some of the people we train will go elsewhere. Some people from elsewhere will come here. We need to make sure that enough people are being trained around the world.
In the context of this Bill, there is a question about what we are doing to support professional bodies around the world. If we think about how the Bill is going to work, if someone is registered as a professional with a professional body in another country and that body is strong, well-resourced and has good record-keeping, the process of us recognising that person here should be very simple. We could simply say to the people in that country, “What have you got registered?” If that professional body is well-resourced, has the right data and all the information we need about their qualifications, that could be a very simple process of agreement between two professional bodies.
I have outlined how I see this amendment. I am not saying it is the perfect solution. I obviously will not be moving it now, but I think a lot more discussion is needed around reporting. However, I want to raise a final point that addresses this and other debates. The Minister has often said that the Government need the flexibility of Henry VIII clauses because it is a fast-changing world. I have been thinking about the debate thus far. We have been thinking a lot—I have myself—about people moving to the UK to provide professional services. I was drawn to a case study that emerged a month or so back about what has been happening with the national tutoring programme. It emerged that tutors as young as 17, earning as little as £1.57 an hour, with an average of £3.07 an hour, were, through that national programme, providing tutoring in maths for disadvantaged primary school pupils.
We think about what has been happening in our medical services through necessity throughout the pandemic. A great deal of medical consultations are now being conducted online. There is no requirement for the person doing that; they can be literally anywhere in the world. If we start to think about what has happened to so many professionals in the UK who have seen their employment conditions subjected to casualisation and zero hours contracts—I am thinking here of a lot of university lecturers—we see that how professionals are employed has changed enormously. I suggest to your Lordships that we need to think about how that is going to play out differently in the context of this Bill.