Wes Streeting

We set UK medical school places based on future health system needs. We cannot control how many places the overseas campus universities create, whether they are UK-based universities or not. Prioritising those graduates in the way that the right hon. Gentleman suggests would undermine sustainable workforce planning. It would also undermine social mobility and fair access. Those campuses are commercial ventures; they receive no public funding and students are generally self-funded. The nature of prioritisation is that we set priorities, and these are the priorities that this Government are setting out. We must break our over-reliance on international recruitment. As I have said, I am proud of the fact that the NHS is an international employer, and it is no coincidence that the Empire Windrush landed on these shores in 1948, the very year our NHS was founded. We are lucky that we have people from around the world who come and work in our health and care service. Since Brexit, however, under the last Government, we have begun to see something much more corrosive, with the NHS poaching staff from countries on the World Health Organisation’s red list because their own shortages of medical practitioners are so severe. The continued plundering of doctors from countries that desperately need them while we have an army of talented and willing recruits who cannot get jobs is morally unacceptable. If some Opposition Members want to defend that record and dismiss the morality argument, I would point out that that position is naive on economic grounds. Competition for medical staff has never been fiercer. The World Health Organisation estimates a shortfall of 11 million health workers by 2030. Shoring up our own workforce will limit our exposure to such global pressures without depriving other countries of their own home-grown talent.