Speeches by George.

“There has been a fall of 5% in community nurses in the last decade. Just coming down to the practicalities of providing palliative care in the home, setting up a syringe driver, the titration and so on cannot be done by a care worker. It has to be done by a qualified, competent registered nurse, or nurses working in ta…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under you, Ms Furniss. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Ian Roome) on securing this debate and making a very strong case, of which I hope the Minister will take heed. I will return to some of the prehistory, because I have campaigned on this issue for so long. I congra…”

“It seems to me that specialist consultants are running at about 10 per 1 million of population. Is that the target? Is that the right ratio, or should it be higher than that?”

“Yes. You are putting on a brave face, but it is still not good, is it?”

“On the question of geographical coverage, and given the Minister’s comment that he has not received representations about further areas for inclusion, I urge the Government to review the scheme and to take an objective measure themselves of where else it might extend to, rather than inviting us to form an orderly queue…”

“Will the Minister give way one more time?”

“There are 78 senior consultant vacancies, and 55 retirements are expected very soon.”

“We have been through the model many times, and we understand it and the three shifts. But the workforce is not there; it has declined in the last decade. After all, 130 of the 168 hours in a week are out of hours. People needing palliative care need those specialist services delivered to them, whether it be hospice at …”

“The Minister raised the issue of the administrative burden. I was referring to an occasion when an operator of the scheme was late in his submission to HMRC, in which case he was refused the rebate, which he had been taking. In such circumstances, he had to appeal. I was simply demonstrating the rigidity and lack of hu…”

“T6. Season’s greetings, Mr Speaker. In October, a Censuswide survey of 200 farms showed that 76% felt under financial pressure from supermarket buying practices, and seven in 10 thought that the buying relationship between supermarkets and farmers had worsened in the past two years. When will the Government publish the…”

“To continue on workforce, I will take you back to the statement you made to Parliament prior to the strikes. I raised this question with you: “If there was an agreement on training places and jobs, would you really withdraw that if the strike went ahead?”, and you said yes. Is this not cutting off your nose to spite yo…”

“I don’t want to stray into other areas like asylum. You are talking about decent pay and decent working conditions. In order to achieve your shift from hospital to community, one of the big problems—in terms of your future workforce plan, which we look forward to seeing—is ensuring that the jobs are attractive enough t…”

“Until that happens, and until our own workers are prepared to take on these jobs—fundamentally, we are talking about jobs involving minimum wage and very hard work, in both social care and care work—we will still be dependent on migrant workers. What are you saying to the Home Secretary to make sure that that supply is…”

“The Minister constantly says that she does not recognise the figures when presented with what are expected to be the settlements for certain local authorities. That is possibly because we are fumbling in the dark today, as the figures simply are not available. I had to go to the Vote Office, and I have some of the pape…”

“You have said that the NHS would collapse without migrant workers, and that is certainly true throughout the NHS. How do you square the fact that the NHS would collapse without migrant workers with the Home Secretary effectively proposing to stop them coming?”

“So it is not a total backtrack; it is a semi-withdrawal of the—”

“Although it may seem a little tangential, will the scope of the investigation include the fact that hundreds of thousands of people who have worked in this country for 20, 30 or 40 years and who have paid their taxes are unable to influence the outcome of elections because they have an EU passport, yet hundreds of thou…”

“The Minister must accept that house building targets are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. House building targets are based on a naive delusion that private developers will collude with Government in driving down the price of their final product, which surely cannot be the case. Cornwall is not a nimby locat…”

“I strongly endorse the Secretary of State’s emphasis on the importance of vaccination, not least to protect the resilience of frontline NHS staff and face down the anti-vaxxers and vaccine-hesitant. Nevertheless, will he reflect carefully on his emphasis on the shift from hospital to community at this time, given that …”

“Further to the excellent campaigning and question by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) and the brilliant question from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray), will the Minister say a bit more about preventing or at least reducing repeat offending? Specifically, will the …”