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Modernising Medical Careers

My hon. Friend has captured exactly what we are trying to achieve through this debate. If hon. Members read the motion, they will see that its objective is not to engage in the easy task of saying, ““It’s all gone wrong and the Government are to blame.? The motion engages with the question of what needs to happen now, although I note that the Government amendment says nothing at all about that. The Government have been given warnings and they have to account for why they did not accurately reflect on the problems. The hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer), who asked the Whips’ question and then left the Chamber, said that this is about the number of applicants. However, I remember standing at this Dispatch Box on 20 December 2005 and making it clear to the Secretary of State that there would be a problem in August 2007 because two year cohorts of applicants would be coming together in one year, so the number of applicants for training posts would effectively double. The Secretary of State said that that issue had to be addressed. With a year and a half in hand, I was foolish enough to imagine that she would solve the problem. When, on 13 December 2006, Lord Warner said that junior doctors in England should be pretty confident about securing a training post and that additional training posts would be created, I was foolish enough to think that the Government had considered the situation and arrived at a solution. There was a good deal of forewarning. The royal colleges rightly told the Government that the programme should be piloted, as my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West suggested, but that did not happen. Last year, junior doctors in the British Medical Association wanted a delay of a year. To be fair, I was not sure that that was the right thing to do because it would have harmed the circumstances of the foundation programme graduates. None the less, the BMA was rightly pointing out serious unresolved problems.