Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the effect of the one per cent pay cap on recruitment and retention levels at Cheshire and Merseyside Sustainability and Transformation Plan.

National Health Service staff do a fantastic job in tough circumstances, and pay restraint has been challenging for many of them.

However, given the financial pressures, it is also true that the NHS would not have been able to recruit an additional 30,400 professionally qualified clinical staff since May 2010 without the cap.

No such assessment has been made on recruitment and retention at the local level of the Cheshire and Merseyside Sustainability and Transformation Plan.