Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment his Department has made of the potential effect of ending NHS bursaries on the ability of the NHS to recruit nurses from within the UK from 2020 onwards.

The Government assessment undertaken to date is that nursing is consistently one of the most popular courses on University Central Administration Service with 57,000 applicants for around 20,000 nursing places in 2014. Midwifery and Allied Health Professional courses receive higher than average applications as well.

Rather than denying thousands of United Kingdom applicants a place to study nursing at university and then being forced to hire new nurses from overseas and others from expensive agencies, these reforms will be boosting participation and securing the future supply of home-grown nurses to the National Health Service. The reforms will enable the creation of up to 10,000 additional nursing, midwifery and allied health professional university training places in this Parliament.

A public consultation will be published during March 2016, an Equalities Analysis and Economic Impact Assessment will be published alongside the consultation document.