---

NHS Staffing

I warmly welcome this opportunity to debate this broad topic, although I am not sure what we have learned about NHS staffing from the speech that the Minister has just completed. It made no reference to the real problems experienced by NHS staff. The Government seem to have a paradoxical approach to their stewardship of the NHS. No one doubts their commitment to trying to make it work better, and it is factually correct that investment has increased. However, their management of the NHS is not delivering the necessary return on that investment, or delivering the real, positive change that the Government themselves recognise as necessary. At the heart of that paradox is the fact that this Government seek to control everything from Whitehall. Too often, they employ a one-size-fits-all approach, yet at the same time they seem to have something of a feudal, divide-and-rule attitude to NHS staff. Their running battles and regular and increasingly bloody skirmishes with different sectors of the NHS are causing resentment, disillusionment and anger among the people on whom we rely for the delivery of health services in this country. We are also still reaping the results of botched contract negotiations and inadequate work force planning. Taken together, those problems are holding back the NHS, at a time when it should be allowed to prosper and flourish. The 2006 Health Select Committee report branded work force planning in NHS a ““disastrous failure””. More recently, Lord Darzi's report outlined the need for an overhaul of work force planning and the commissioning of education and training. So far, however, it seems that very little has changed. There is an overall equation that at the moment simply does not balance. Staff have been taken on with no long-term thinking but simply to achieve centrally imposed targets. People have been laid off or denied training places so that NHS trusts can balance their books. Like MPs all over the country, I have had junior doctors, nurses and physiotherapists visiting my surgery or writing me letters because, after all the hard work that they have done—and all the training that they have received at great cost to the taxpayer—they simply cannot find a job. Yet huge amounts of money—some £1.18 billion in 2005-06—are being spent on agency nurses. They are hired at huge cost to the taxpayer, but better planning would mean that a great proportion of that money could be spent on health care and on areas where there are real gaps in NHS staffing. Of course, the Department of Health has increased the number of training places and encouraged more people to apply for them, but it did not ensure that sufficient jobs would be available down the line for newly qualified professionals. On the one hand, there are real concerns over staffing levels—especially in maternity and other areas—and about the overuse of agency staff but, on the other hand, we have disillusioned young people unable to pursue their chosen careers. The careers that those people want to pursue are needed and valued by society, yet nurses are currently leaving the country in their thousands.