Earl Howe (Con)

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, especially those from around the Committee who felt able to support my Amendment 4. I think there will be very many people in the medical community who will read the Minister’s reply to my amendment with acute disappointment. I say that not only because of the arguments I tried to articulate about legitimate expectations but also because of the point, well made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, about the damage that the Bill will cause to the UK’s reputation for fairness around the world. I would also pray in aid the amendment spoken to so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, who argued in favour of delaying the implementation of the medical specialty training prioritisation requirements by one year. In doing so, he has very much echoed my thinking in this whole area. My initial reaction to this amendment is that it would have a positive impact on applicant confidence, as well as trust in the system, to pick up again the point by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, by allowing an extra year to transition to the new prioritisation process. I also note that my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, in his role as chairman of the Constitution Committee, has written to the Minister, raising the committee’s concerns about the impact of the new prioritisation regime on applicants for the 2026 cohort who would fall outside the prioritised groups. It seems to me that Ministers really should consider this proposal carefully. Amendment 10 by the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, would remove the requirement that those who are prioritised for specialty training programmes must have indefinite leave to remain or leave to enter or remain in the UK, replacing those subsections with the requirement that persons merely need to have been “registered on the NHS Oriel recruitment platform, or … demonstrated a professional commitment to the National Health Service”. I thought the noble Lord argued his case very well. Of course, material in this context is the number of applicants who do not currently have leave to enter or remain in the UK who would, under the noble Lord’s amendment, be able to come here. I am, however, quite surprised to hear from the Minister that it would require a manual search of tens of thousands of records to find the answer to that, and that there are not ways of conducting a search automatically or electronically that could reveal the information that is needed. Again, I was disappointed by the Minister’s reply, for the reasons largely cited by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. Finally, I comment briefly on the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, to which I added my name. These do not seem to me to be onerous on the Government in any way; they merely grant the Secretary of State the power to permit the appropriate authority to make regulations specifying further groups of people who are included. I feel that the Bill is particularly unfair to doctors with significant NHS experience seeking a specialty training post in 2026, and the mechanism proposed in the noble Lord’s amendments could be used to address that unfairness. It is a pity that the Minister felt compelled to sound a negative note on the proposals by the noble Lord, Lord Stevens. However, having listened to the Minister’s reply and to all the amendments in this group, I think a period of reflection is warranted, hopefully by the Government as well as noble Lords around the Committee. With that, I beg to withdraw Amendment 4.