Rachel Reeves has challenged Jeremy Hunt to find the money for Labour’s plan to double training places for doctors and nurses – pointing out he said he wanted to “nick” the opposition’s policy just two weeks before becoming chancellor.
The shadow chancellor said NHS shortages were causing 1.5 million people in need of medical treatment to say their work was suffering, with new analysis showing it was costing the economy about £700m a year.
Ahead of the spring budget this month, Reeves has written to Hunt urging him to adopt Labour’s workforce plan for the NHS, which advocates doubling medical school places to 15,000; doubling the number of district nurses qualifying from 700 to 1,400 a year; training 5,000 new health visitors a year; and creating an extra 10,000 nursing and midwifery clinical placements every year. The NHS has a vacancy rate of 10%, or 133,000 posts.
She highlighted Hunt’s comments in his Patient Safety weekly email on 28 September last year, just 15 days before he became chancellor, saying: “Despite my obvious political allegiances it would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that Labour has pledged to double the number of medical school places and recruit additional health visitors and district nurses.
“The medical school place increase was something the select committee called for in its report on workforce and so is something I very much hope the government also adopts on the basis that smart governments always nick the best ideas of their opponents.”
The NHS is coming up with its own workforce plan at the moment, which in draft form is believed to call for a doubling of doctor and nurse training places, but the Treasury is yet to commit to more funding. The Times reported last week that the Treasury was holding out against the scale of the proposal on grounds of cost.
In her letter, Reeves said a decade of Conservative government and the pandemic had left the NHS “not just on its knees but on its face”.
She said Office for National Statistics (ONS) data suggested that more than 1.5 million people believed that their wait for NHS treatment was negatively affecting their work, and almost a quarter of them – 363,000 people – reported reducing their working hours as a result.
Reeves said that one in 10 said they had stopped working altogether – about 174,000 people – with 9% reporting going on long-term sick leave – amounting to about 142,000 people.
Further analysis of the survey shows that this could cost the Treasury £700m a year and employers £14m a week.
“Now that you are in the role of chancellor, you have the capability to be able to adopt this Labour policy to benefit not just our NHS but our economic growth. Getting our economy growing is vital for raising living standards, for creating good jobs across the country and for leading on the global stage again,” she said.
When Hunt was health secretary, he increased the number of medical school places from 6,000 to 7,500 and oversaw the creation of five new medical schools in England. During his tenure as chair of the Commons health and social care select committee, it produced a report last July warning that the NHS was facing “the greatest workforce crisis in history”.
