Danny Beales

I am about to turn to a specific issue about British citizens, so I hope I will pick up on the hon. Member’s points. More generally, there is nothing progressive about a system that promotes a brain drain from some of the most deprived and underdeveloped communities in the world, with significant health needs. To have doctors and nurses come from those systems on an industrial scale, and to take away the resources spent in those systems on education and training for our benefit in a western, developed country, is not progressive. It is important to welcome the provisions in the Bill that address those challenges. As the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) raised, I will press the Secretary of State—and the Minister for Secondary Care, who is now in place—on the specific language of the Bill, which seeks to prioritise graduates from medical schools in the United Kingdom, rather than UK citizens who are medical graduates. Like other Members, I have been contacted by a number of my constituents who will be affected by these provisions. That includes Alisha, a British citizen who was schooled and grew up here; her family live in Ickenham in my constituency, and she is a first-year medical student at Queen Mary University of London’s campus in Malta, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) mentioned earlier. When she enrolled last year, she was given a guarantee by the university that she would face no disadvantage compared with students on the London campus. We have heard that there can never be any guarantees; that there is not a legal contract that this Government make with individuals; and that this House is sovereign, and can make different decisions. But I think there are issues of fairness around the retrospective applications of decisions that we make that can affect people’s lives, particularly at crucial points, such as when studying or getting a job—decisions that have major impacts on someone’s future life chances. Alisha studies a British curriculum and she will be awarded the same degree qualification as her peers on the London campus. However, if the Bill’s current wording is interpreted strictly geographically instead of institutionally, it would mean that she is categorised as an international medical graduate, despite being a British citizen, studying a British medical degree at a British university. I ask the Secretary of State to take away this point and, with officials, to look at this specific issue in greater detail and at modelling and sharing the number of UK citizens projected to be affected this academic year by those changes. If, as has been suggested by Queen Mary University, this is a matter of 40 or 50 individuals, I ask the Secretary of State to look at whether further changes could be made to ameliorate the impact on UK citizens, at least in a transitional way, that would not bind us in future academic years. I also ask that officials have discussions with Maltese counterparts about our important and ongoing strategic relationship in health and other key areas. To conclude, there is much to welcome in this Bill. I know that medical colleges and societies strongly support many of the provisions. I hope that they will be the start of a broader process of a comprehensive workforce plan that will address the many challenges in workforce planning, training and development and the numbers of bottlenecks that exist throughout the workforce system so that we have a training and development system for medical professionals in this country that delivers both positive results for patients and better and fairer outcomes for those applying to study, learn and train.