Lord Winston (Lab)

My Lords, I too am a little bit concerned about unintended consequences. It is a real pleasure to see my noble friend Lord Darzi in his place, because I hope he will have comments on this issue. I trained as a clinical academic. Indeed, we know that clinical academics have had a unique value to the health service. They work part-time in the health service with a reduced salary and do research at the same time. I am very concerned that many of the clinical academics we have had at Imperial College, for example, have been from overseas. They were medically qualified elsewhere but had not yet been in Britain and were still junior doctors, in a sense. I am really concerned that there are many such people who come to Britain, do a postdoctoral degree such as a PhD and, in the meantime, keep their medical skills flowing, as I did myself. I was seven years in this situation with the Wellcome Trust. I remember it very well. I was overseas but at least knew that I could come back to Britain. But I was a British subject—that was easy. There are so many of these people. To give just one example, Professor Jan Brosens at Warwick University is undoubtedly one of the key people who have contributed massively to female health, particularly on implantation of the ovum and in his magnificent work on endometriosis. He came as a junior doctor from Belgium, from Leuven University, to what was then Hammersmith Hospital, which is now, of course, Imperial College. Now, he is a very distinguished professor at Warwick University with a very large team. His recruitment made a very big difference to the whole field. His is not an isolated example; there are many such people I can think of. I hope the noble Baroness can suggest some way of dealing with this problem of unusually good graduates from elsewhere, who may not be British citizens, perhaps, in the current priorities, but who would really be deserving of serious consideration for certain specialty jobs. Not to do that would be a great loss to the health service.