Truss: I’ll halt NHS doctor exodus
Tory frontrunner vows to ease backlog as priority alongside energy and tax cuts
LIZ TRUSS has pledged to halt the exodus of doctors from the NHS to tackle the Covid backlog and surging waiting lists.
The frontrunner in the Conservative leadership race is planning to unveil a series of radical reforms that will stop doctors leaving the profession early and entice retirees to return.
One in 10 consultants and GPs is expected to retire in the next 18 months because of pension rules that mean they are “paying to work”.
It comes amid concerns that the NHS backlog after lockdown is causing more than 1,000 excess deaths a week – more than the figure now killed each week by coronavirus.
The Sunday Telegraph has learnt the backlog would be one of Ms Truss’s top three priorities in Downing Street, alongside measures to broaden the energy supply and cut taxes.
A source close to the Foreign Secretary said she would try to solve the NHS staffing crisis by “cutting red tape and dealing with issues in the pension and tax system that currently act as barriers for people wanting to return”.
Doctors are given a lifetime cap on their pensions and are subject to taxes when they make payments that exceed it, which sends thousands into early retirement.
Nearly seven in 10 surgeons said in a recent poll that they had reduced their NHS workload as a result.
Under draft plans being considered by Ms Truss, doctors would be able to continue working after reaching their cap without having to pay taxes.
Ms Truss’s campaign is also considering plans to introduce a national “retire and return” scheme, which would replace a smattering of ad hoc programmes in individual NHS trusts that often leave staff who have returned to work part-time on low-paid, short-term contracts. Red tape forcing retirees to complete lengthy training courses on their return will also be cut, after a drive to hire back retired staff to administer vaccines during the pandemic stalled when recruits were required to provide 21 pieces of evidence, including proof that they had trained in the Government’s Prevent Radicalisation programme.
Ms Truss’s plans to solve the backlog come as:
♦ Sir John Redwood, who is expected to be appointed as a Treasury minister if she wins, called on her to rip up fiscal rules and take inspiration from Margaret Thatcher
♦ Dame Arlene Foster, the former first minister of Northern Ireland, backed Ms Truss for the leadership and claimed she is the best candidate to counter threats to the Union
♦ Rishi Sunak pledged to wage war on Left-wing lawyers and branded himself the campaign’s “underdog”
Ms Truss is understood to be examining plans by Parliament’s health and social care committee, which last month recommended that the NHS pension scheme be remodelled to “prevent the haemorrhage of senior staff ”.
The scheme is structured so that the highest earners, such as senior consultants and GPs, automatically pay up to 14.5 per cent of their earnings into their pension pot.
Doctors cannot opt out of paying into their NHS pensions, even if they have already reached the cap, currently set at £1,073,100, which can result in costly bills if they continue working full-time. Under Ms Truss’s plans, doctors could be allowed to voluntarily stop paying into their pensions once they have reached the cap.
A recent poll by the Royal College of Surgeons of England found that 69 per cent of respondents had reduced the amount of time they spent working in the NHS as a result of Mr Sunak freezing
‘You need policies promoting things as appropriate by free enterprise and competitive means, rather than by state monopoly’
LIZ TRUSS should rip up Britain’s fiscal rules if she wins the Conservative leadership race, one of her key allies has said.
Sir John Redwood, who served as the head of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit and is tipped to return to government if Ms Truss becomes prime minister, said she should abandon the practice of targeting a set percentage of GDP for national debt and the deficit.
He also called for a review of both the Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and suggested the Foreign Secretary should be inspired by Mrs Thatcher in removing utilities and transport from state control.
Since 1997, fiscal rules have been announced by chancellors during Budget statements in an attempt to control the public finances.
They usually set a restriction on the proportion of national debt or deficit as a percentage of economic output.
But in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Sir John said the practice was a hangover from EU fiscal regulation agreed between member states at the Maastricht conference in 1992, and does not encourage economic growth or limit inflation.
“I think having a fiscal rule, which is a variant of state debt as a percentage of GDP, and the public deficit as percentage of GDP in any given year, is not really the right couple of rules for the two targets you’re trying to meet,” he said.
The Tory backbencher said ministers should maintain “sensible controls over growth in public spending and in public debt” by instead monitoring the amount of money paid by the Treasury to lenders in interest payments.
In a coded rebuke to Rishi Sunak, who was the Chancellor until last month, he added: “You have to elect governments that take controlling public finances seriously, and they then have to take them seriously.
“If you have a government that doesn’t take controlling public finances seriously, it won’t matter what your fiscal rules say, as we know from recent past experience.”
Sir John is expected to be appointed as a Treasury minister in Ms Truss’s government and is understood to have helped shape her thinking on economic issues during the campaign.
He has spent the majority of his parliamentary career on the backbenches, where he has argued for a smaller state and against Britain’s membership of the EU, after resigning dramatically from Sir John Major’s Cabinet in 1995 when the prime minister told his critics to “put up or shut up”.
Sir John said he had not had “any discussions” with Ms Truss about taking a role if she wins the contest, but told The Sunday Telegraph he would accept a job if he was offered one. “I’ve always said I’d be happy to take a job which I thought I could do and which the leader thought was valuable for the conduct of government,” he said.
The Wokingham MP welcomed Ms Truss’s announcement that she would review the work of the Bank of England if she is elected prime minister, following its failure to keep inflation to its target rate of 2 per cent each year.
Inflation hit double figures for the first time in 40 years this week, and is expected to increase to as much as 13 per cent later this year.
Despite warnings from the Bank that a UK recession is likely this year, Ms Truss has said she does not believe a crash is “inevitable”.
“What the Bank of England needs to do is to explore why its own forecasting models were certainly inaccurate on inflation,” Sir John said.
“I think you need to get the Bank to consider why it doesn’t seem to take much interest in money and credit.
“There are quite a lot of people who feel that if they had watched growth in money and credit more carefully, they would have picked up earlier signals of potential inflationary trouble to come.”
He also suggested that the next prime minister should review the role of the OBR, an independent spending watchdog introduced in 2010, which is also in charge of monitoring the Government’s adherence to the fiscal rules.
Sir John accused the OBR of producing inaccurate models that underestimated how much revenue the Treasury would receive, informing Mr Sunak’s decision to raise National Insurance Contributions to fund NHS and social care spending.
“It seemed he took that judgment based on those figures, telling him that he was going to get far too little revenue from the existing taxes,” he said.
“We now know he was going to get a lot more revenue and indeed, the famous £12 billion National Insurance rise, which was very contentious, is completely dwarfed by the £77billion of extra tax collected in 2021-22.”
Sir John called on Ms Truss to follow in the footsteps of Mrs Thatcher, whom he advised between 1982 and 1987, and resist the temptation to run the railways or utility companies from Whitehall.
“You need to have policies which promote more things as appropriate to be done by free enterprise and competitive means, rather than by state monopoly,” he said.
“That’s what obviously we did quite a lot in the 1980s. It took the brakes off their investment capital, which had been restricted by being part of the public expenditure exercise, and the competition allowed huge changes in approach and technology.”
He warned there was a “danger” that recent rail reforms by Grant Shapps, who is backing Rishi Sunak, would lead to too much state control of Britain’s railways.
“Ministers are saying that they don’t wish to end up with a nationalised railway,” he said.
“They want the benefits of more integrated procurement and timetabling but you’ve got to be very careful that that doesn’t lead to single nationalised control at the centre, and demands for a big subsidy to run a pattern of services.”