Health Bill

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I was very pleased to add my name to the two amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, Amendments 92 and 252, regarding the mental health workforce. More generally, I was very taken by the way this important group of amendments was introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, because she is right that all the things that we have been talking about in this Bill so far—all the things we all want to see to improve the health of this country, and all the things we want the NHS to be able to do with, yes, efficiency and increased productivity but also with great care and compassion—will none of them be achieved unless we have the right workforce with the right skills and the education and training in place. That is why I think this is such an important group of amendments.

As I said, I was very pleased to add my name to the two amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, on the mental health workforce. She set out the case clearly, so I do not need to do it again. I simply reiterate that, once we have the long-awaited NHS workforce plan, this will be vital. I would be grateful if the Minister could make some commitment here about how quickly we will see a follow-up mental health workforce plan. We need to see some detail about how the mental health workforce will be recruited and retained and will be able to meet the scale of the mental health demand, which we have debated so many times on so many occasions. That is critical. Both those amendments are important in that respect.

My final point is that, during the passage of the Mental Health Bill, in which many noble Lords here were involved, we all quite rightly thought how important it was that as many mental health services as possible should be located in the community. We all agreed with that; it was the premise, as it were, on which the rest of that legislation was built. As important as the consultants and psychiatrists and so on are—of course they are; it is a wide-ranging workforce and includes mental health nurses and others as well—unless we have that workforce in the right place, in the community, appropriately skilled, educated and trained, we will never be able to deliver those community mental health services, which are so vital. So I was very pleased to support these amendments.

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson. It is an important amendment raising two fundamental questions, which I hope the Minister will be able to answer. The first is this: ultimately, in preparing a workforce plan that will enjoy broad confidence, there must be external scrutiny of that plan. It would be most helpful if the Minister could confirm how His Majesty’s Government’s healthcare workforce plan will be independently scrutinised. Also, how will His Majesty’s Government be able to reconcile potential differences generated as part of that independent scrutiny with what they consider to be deliverable at this particular moment in time?

The second issue is how a mechanism will be secured—now that the functions independently exercised in NHS England will become the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Health—in respect of long-term workforce needs and short-term financial pressures. As we have heard, investment in the workforce is a long-term investment, and Ministers will always be faced with short-term financial problems and crises. Historically in the NHS, the education and training budget has been periodically sacrificed when there have been other service, access and delivery demands on NHS institutions.

In providing an opportunity now with this Bill, how will the Government address that fundamental tension and secure a mechanism both for independent scrutiny and to ensure—with all the powers now lying in the hands of the Secretary of State for Health—that the education and training budget that secures the long-term development of the workforce cannot be sacrificed for short-term exigencies?

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak mainly to Amendment 252 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. I apologise for not putting my name to it; I wish I had.

But I wish to speak first on two other amendments. The amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, is useful, and I thank her for the way that she presented it. An independently verified assessment and a 10-year plan is exactly what is needed. But I do have a word of caution. Publication within one month of Royal Assent could be a real challenge, even considering the amount of time that we have been waiting. Also, a plan that is produced that quickly risks being inaccurate, and an inaccurate workforce plan is worse than none at all, because people will make training and funding decisions on it. The amendment from my noble friend Lady Pidgeon offers a better timescale of 12 months from Royal Assent as well as an assessment of the staff needed, a funded plan to close the gap and an annual report to Parliament.

Amendment 252 matters because it names people who are easily forgotten in workforce planning: that is, the staff who care for people with a learning disability. Let me start with why that matters. The latest—in fact the last ever—national LeDeR report found that the median age at death for adults with a learning disability was 62.8 years, compared with 81.8 years for the general population. That is a gap of 19 years. Many noble Lords will know that my own wonderful nephew, Myles, who was 31 years old, is part of that terrible, tragic statistic. Some 39% of deaths of these adults were judged to be avoidable, against 21% for the general population. No workforce plan can fix that alone, but no plan that ignores it is worth having.