National Health Service: Nurses

Lord Clark of Windermere Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Clark of Windermere]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to increase the number of nurses working in the National Health Service in England.

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, we are committed to ensuring that nursing remains an attractive career so that the NHS builds on the record number of nurses currently on wards, but we need to do more. We have put in place several actions to address this, such as improving staff retention, return to practice, overseas recruitment and sickness absence, expanding nursing associates and reviewing language controls.

[Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her Answer. Does she accept that the 41,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS conceal even worse problems? The number of district nurses has been cut by 50% and the number of both mental health nurses and school nurses has been cut by over a quarter. Does the Minister accept that the long-term plan for the NHS will work only if proper attention is paid to staffing issues? Can she confirm there is currently no money for any future staff training and reform in the budget, which depends on the Department of Health and Social Care’s education and training budget? How confident is she that that money will be forthcoming and when will we hear how much it will be?

[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, I agree with much of what the noble Lord said. There is a shortage of nurses in the NHS: 41,000 vacancies, as he rightly identified. To put that into context, our policies have enabled the NHS to put more than 13,400 more nurses on our wards since 2010. We are not complacent. We have increased nurse training places by 25% from September 2018. To reassure the noble Lord, there are more than 52,000 nurses in training. Although there are more applications than places, we know that we need to do much more work with universities. On the NHS 10-year plan, the noble Lord rightly identified that the training budget has not been set yet. We will do that by the spring. My noble friend Lady Harding is taking a quick look at the forward plan, the type of vacancies and how we can recruit more nurses into the NHS.