Member

I will seek to address the various and legitimate points that have been raised. Graduates of international overseas campuses of UK medical schools—this is the fundamental challenge that I have discussed with noble Lords—do not form part of the UK’s workforce planning. We can control the number of medical school places in the UK, and we can set a number according to NHS needs, but we do not have control over student recruitment at overseas campuses that are operated by UK medical schools. The reality is that prioritising these graduates would undermine a key aim of the Bill, which is to keep foundation training aligned with the NHS workforce we are planning for, to reflect taxpayer investment—again, something of importance to noble Lords—and to manage the bottlenecks in specialty training.