NHS leaders have raised concerns about the delay to the long-awaited workforce plan, after the health secretary, Steve Barclay, refused to give a deadline for its publication and with rumours suggesting it is considered too costly.
The plan, which was expected to be published on Tuesday, appears to have been delayed, according to the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, Saffron Cordery.
Barclay blamed the pandemic and “various things that have been happening in recent years” for the delay during broadcast interviews over the weekend. He had previously promised that the plan to increase the number of doctors and nurses would be published before the next general election.
Cordery said the plan, which aims to fix the UK’s crumbling healthcare system by plugging chronic staff shortages but which has already been postponed from last year, was needed “as quickly as possible”.
Until this weekend NHS Providers – which represents all England’s hospital, ambulance, community and mental health trusts – had believed publication of the plan was “imminent”. Cordery suggested that the failure to release it could be linked to the need for funding.
Cordery told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We know that when it comes, it will be a very significant commitment of funding from the government because what we’re talking about is setting out the number of training places and the number of staff that the NHS needs over the next decade or so.”
She said: “What everyone has been calling for, and what Jeremy Hunt committed to in his autumn statement last year and indeed talked about in the spring budget, was a fully funded and fully articulated workforce plan for the NHS. So I think that we are talking about something to do with the funding of this plan.”
The Times reported that the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, are holding talks this week on the plan’s ballooning cost, with figures believed to run into the tens of billions.
The newspaper quoted a senior NHS source as saying that the delays are due to the “significant investment” required. “They can’t agree the financial commitment. It was all set to go this week and now the PM wants to run through it in detail,” the source said.
Treasury officials are said to be continuing to push NHS leaders to lower their estimates of how many extra doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals are needed over the next five to 15 years.
The workforce plan is expected to include an expansion of nurse apprenticeships, which nursing leaders have cautiously welcomed.
Health leaders want to double medical school and nurse training places to underpin a long-term staffing strategy aimed at reducing chronic shortages. The NHS has a vacancy rate of 10%, or 133,000 posts.
An NHS England workforce plan submitted to ministers in March said the health service is already operating with 154,000 fewer full-time staff than it needs, and that number could swell to 571,000 staff by 2036 on current trends. The document urged the government to train more homegrown health professionals rather than relying on overseas recruitment and costly agency workers, or face a health system buckling under the pressure of rising demand from an ageing population.
Last week it was revealed that some A&E departments in England were spending more than 80% of their pay budget on agency doctors to fill vacant shifts, compared with last year when the figure was 19%, according to NHS data analysed by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM).
