Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many newly qualified nurses and midwives are expected to join the Nursing and Midwifery Council register in (a) 2025-26 and (b) 2026-27; and how many Band 5 nursing and midwifery vacancies were there in each of these periods.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council publishes data twice a year on the makeup of its professional register, and this includes information on the number of people trained in the United Kingdom who have joined the register for the first time, which will be a close proxy for newly qualified nurses and midwives. This information can be found at the link below:

https://www.nmc.org.uk/about-us/reports-and-accounts/registration-statistics/

The data shows 22,176 nursing and midwifery first time registrants, who were resident in England, joining in the year to March 2025 who will largely have entered education three years earlier, in the 2021/22 academic year. Data published by the Office for Students as part of the Higher Education Students Early Statistics release shows nursing and midwifery undergraduate entrants fell 9% between 2021/22 and 2022/23 and a further 14% between 2022/23 and 2024 after a big increase in joiners during 2020/21 and 2021/22. We might therefore expect that numbers joining the Nursing and Midwifery Council register fall similar amounts in 2025/26 and 2026/27.

The Department does not hold information on the number of band 5 nursing and midwifery vacancies there were in 2025/26 or that there are projected to be in 2026/27. Data is published quarterly on total registered nursing vacancies and can found at the link below:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-vacancies-survey