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Modernising Medical Careers

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for advance sight of the statement and for coming to make a further statement on those matters. The Secretary of State said that she welcomed the High Court judgment and acknowledged the criticisms made by Mr. Justice Goldring. At the very least, she might have had the good grace to accept them. He said, for example, that"““the fact the claimant””—" Legal Remedy UK—"““has failed in what was accepted to be an unprecedented application so far as the law is concerned does not mean that many junior doctors do not have an entirely justifiable sense of grievance.””" They certainly do. He continued:"““The premature introduction of MTAS has had disastrous consequences. It was a flawed system””." He also says that"““the shortlisting process was flawed. The application form was unreliable as a measure of ability…the algorithm needed to govern the allocation process under MTAS did not work””." Not least as a result of the judgment, the Secretary of State has had to accept many of the criticisms that the Opposition have made over the past two months. She will also have to accept—not least because Professor Douglas and his review group have recommended them—some of the remedies that we called for. For example, in the statement she essentially said that additional training posts would be available. She will recall that that is precisely what I called for from the Dispatch Box on 19 March. The Secretary of State and her colleagues disparaged that call. Time has been lost and that is a lamentable further failing after the original failings of the MTAS scheme. I wish to ask the Secretary of State some further important questions. Can she confirm that it is not her intention to seek costs from Legal Remedy UK? That would be a deplorable act after all that it has gone through. Secondly, she has announced how many additional run-through training posts are to be made, but she will know that what is even more significant is how many temporary training posts are able to be added. How many posts will be in round 2? She says that the number will be substantial. The word ““substantial”” is often used and Mr. Justice Goldring was right yesterday when he said that—as the Secretary of State said on 13 March—it is very important that a ““significant”” number of posts are available in round 2. In the Department’s evidence to the High Court it was said that there would be unfilled posts from round 1, posts that were held back from round 1, and new posts. Can the Secretary of State tell us how many new posts there will be in round 2 and how many posts have been held back from round 1? I know that she will not be able to tell us how many unfilled posts there will be from round 1, but can she explain why, both in her evidence to the High Court and in the letter to applicants sent out yesterday, it continues to be the Department’s view that the offer and re-offer process will enable the units of application—the deaneries—to fill as many training posts as possible? Surely the objective of round 1 is not to fill as many training posts as possible, but—as she said on 13 March—to fill training posts wherever the interviewers are satisfied that they have an eminently qualified candidate; otherwise, round 2 will not have as many posts as it should. Back in late April, the Department appeared to believe that there were between 500 and 1,300 foundation programme graduates who were at risk of not attracting either specialist training one posts or fixed-term specialist training posts. Do I gather from the Secretary of State’s statement that it is now her intention to ensure that every suitably qualified foundation programme graduate, which I hope is virtually all of them, will find a training post, and that the numbers will be brought down virtually to zero? Can the Secretary of State tell us what she might further do to help hospitals with their problems at the beginning of August? It is virtually impossible for many hospitals to advertise and attract candidates for service posts starting on 1 August in circumstances in which so many junior doctors have no idea whether they will get training posts. Round 2 will extend beyond August, perhaps all the way to November. It is therefore vital that as many as possible of those posts be converted to training posts, even if they are temporary training posts or, as the letter to applicants says, a process will follow in which PMETB tries to progress the posts into ones that it recognises for training purposes. What will the Secretary of State do to try to help trusts to fill posts in circumstances that are becoming increasingly difficult? How can all this be achieved in circumstances in which, in several regions, the MPET budgets, which were cut last year, also face cuts this year? We know from SHA board papers that £136 million will be cut from MPET budgets. Surely that was always intended to be a one-year cut in the education and training budget. If it carries on, it will prejudice the delivery of all of those objectives. We have arrived at the point at which the Secretary of State comes to the House to report what Professor Douglas tells her should happen this year and, for the future, what Professor Sir John Tooke and his review tell her will happen. To all intents and purposes, the Secretary of State is now merely a cipher for the profession. Frankly speaking, that is a better solution than has been the case in the past, because the Secretary of State has so completely failed. If she would only admit that, as Mr. Justice Goldring said yesterday, the process has been a disaster, that would serve her rather better.