Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of increasing the (a) funding for and (b) number of specialty training posts in line with changes in the number of medical training places.

To support the workforce as a whole, we have commissioned NHS England to develop a long term workforce plan for the next 15 years. This plan will help ensure that we have the right numbers of staff with the right skills to transform and deliver high quality services fit for the future. In 2022, Health Education England announced 750 additional medical specialty training posts across all programmes, and in 2023, HEE announced that nearly 900 additional medical specialty training posts have been created for this year.