John Howell (Henley) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Eleanor Smith), especially because she was a nurse. Incidentally, on her point that nurses are more popular than politicians, when the Houses of Parliament burnt down in the 1830s, the cheers could be heard from Westminster Bridge, where people took out their frustration with politicians.
It is wrong to approach this debate in an aggressive "them and us" spirit. We all aim to increase the funding for nurses to an appropriate and proper level. I agree that nurses do a fantastic job, but we should acknowledge those nurses who are involved in end-of-life care—in my hospital, they work closely with social care staff.
However, before addressing that, I should say that, only last week, I visited my hospital in Henley—Townlands Memorial Hospital—with the previous Minister for Health. I extend an invitation to the current Minister to visit the hospital, which has a unique way of doing business. We and the NHS see it as an exemplar in the country. We spoke to a number of nurses about the services they provide, particularly in relation to the rapid access care unit, which looks after people above a certain age very well—they typically seek treatment there. I pay tribute to those nurses.
In our conversation with the nurses, we raised the point about funding for their education. We had a very mature discussion about the lack of bursaries following Government action. As a result, there was a general agreement that the situation that existed with the bursaries was not particularly helpful to nurses seeking to become part of the nursing profession—the NHS effectively generated a cap on the number of people who applied—and that we need a system that encourages people to become nurses as well as go into other professions. We pointed out that, under the bursary system, 30,000 people who applied to become nurses were rejected, which is not a good situation.
We went on to discuss other things in relation to the nursing profession. In particular, the one thing they saw as inhibiting people from becoming a nurse was the price of housing, which is astronomical in the Henley constituency. We need a tremendous amount of affordable housing, to help people to get a start on the housing ladder, and to provide them with rented accommodation where possible.
In addition to visiting the hospital, I have worked with parish councils to encourage them to provide much smaller buses on much tighter routes to give people the ability to travel from their home to their job.
I have been told that the shortage of staff was due to EU nationals leaving, but when I raised that issue with the matron, it emerged that that was not the case at all—the shortage was due to operational reasons.
