Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)

My Lords, I will go back to the question of Oriel and the prioritisation processes. It collects a full employment history from graduation and requires applicants to confirm whether each post was paid NHS experience. I hope the Minister will be able to recognise that some have worked in a voluntary capacity before they were able to get paid employment in the NHS, and that some people, in trying to build up their criteria for eligibility to apply, have worked in non-medical posts in order to gain the background NHS experience that they need. I have been sent a copy of a response that was sent by the Department of Health and Social Care to a query about specified immigration status, which states: “In 2026 the Government is using these immigration statuses as a proxy to capture applicants who it believes will be most likely to have significant experience of working in the health service in the UK”. It goes on to state that that prioritisation “will be applied at the offer stage because shortlisting is already underway”, which, of course, creates a lot of problems for people. I can see that there are difficulties in postponing this, because all the applicants are already in such a state of turmoil that to have a second year of turmoil may not be helpful to them in any sense. There was a worrying sentence at the end of the second paragraph, saying that the Government “will be aiming to have regulations in place for the autumn 2026 application round (subject to parliamentary timetable)”. I hope the Minister will be able to assure us, given that this has been emergency legislation, that the regulations will be treated with a similar degree of urgency to remove any uncertainty for the next round of applicants.