Karin Smyth

It is a pleasure to close on behalf of the Government. I welcome the support of the Opposition spokespeople and the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran). I put on record my thanks to them for meeting me in advance of the Bill and for airing their concerns. From the many contributions this afternoon, there is clearly a broad base of sympathy and support right across the House for the measures in the Bill to support our NHS staff, who have been at the sharp end of every ill-conceived policy of the past 14 years—not least since the previous Government lifted the visa restrictions in 2020, as outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Jessica Toale). The last Government’s failure to do any proper workforce planning has also led to patients struggling to find a GP appointment while GPs struggle to get a job, bottlenecks for resident doctors and an over-reliance on overseas workers and a refusal to foster our own home-grown talent. Although I welcome the support, I find it slightly ironic that some of the Opposition speeches were around the need for clear and consistent routes and for clarity. That is exactly what we intend to provide to fix the mess. We will bring forward wider issues in the workforce plan, which, as the boss said earlier, will be in the spring. That is as a result of the concerns around training from the Royal Colleges and other stakeholders and making sure that we do that properly. We will bring that forward in due course.