Scrap caps on training NHS doctors, says Reform’s Braverman

Reform UK would remove limits on training UK doctors and slash annual student loan expenditure by £4 billion in its first 100 days in office if it were to take power, says its education spokesperson Suella Braverman.

In a speech to the party’s autumn conference, the former Conservative MP told delegates that she would immediately “scrap the cap on homegrown British doctors” if it came to power, noting how “25,000 young Brits applied to study medicine at university, but only 8,000 were admitted.”

“Wonder why nearly two-thirds of young Brits who want to be doctors are rejected by our universities and many end up going to Australia? It’s because successive Labour and Conservative governments have imposed a cap known as intake targets on medical training places,” Braverman told the conference in Birmingham on 5 September.

“Absurdly, previous governments would rather import thousands of foreign doctors than train our own young people. Madness. And that’s why since 2019, the number of foreign doctors has grown four times as fast as the number of British doctors,” she continued, adding: “We rely on too many foreign doctors to keep our NHS going.”

Referring to an “aspiring student doctor” called Emily who, she said, had been forced to emigrate after being denied a place at medical school, Braverman said she would quit as education secretary if Nigel Farage refused to lift the current cap on medical school places.

It costs an estimated £327,000 to train an NHS doctor over the five years of their training, with individual medical students able to claim between £74,000 and £93,000 in student finance over the five years of their course.

In December, Wes Streeting, who was then health secretary, said he would create an additional 4,000 training places at medical schools, with 1,000 additional spots available for the 2026 intake.

Braverman also pledged to end student loan interest payments for nurses – a move which would save the “average nurse tens of thousands of pounds”.

Acknowledging these policies “won’t be cheap”, although “we cannot put a price on your health or the education of our young people”, Braverman said a Reform government would “cut the fat out of our higher education” by cutting student loan expenditure by 20 per cent, saving £4 billion from the £22 billion spent on student loans each year.

“We will redistribute that funding away from failing universities and only allow those degrees to be funded by the taxpayer where there is genuine value for money,” she said, noting that graduates now left university with an “average debt of £50,000 and many of them won’t be employable and will go on welfare”.

“The bottom set of courses that offer dreadful appalling value for money, poor teaching, and zero job prospects will all have their public funding cut,” said Braverman on plans to “remove the rubbish from our university sector” and “end the great university scam”

“If you want to study gender studies, pay for it yourself,” she said.

“The reality is too many of these substandard universities have become no more than visa factories selling immigration, not education,” added Braverman, who recalled that she “used to bang my head against a brick wall brick wall with people like Rishi Sunak…and Jeremy Hunt when I was in the last Conservative government trying to tell them we needed to cut the number of foreign students”.

Promising to “institute a new value-for-money test so that degrees and universities must meet certain requirements to get funding”, Braverman said: “No more funding for woke degrees. No more funding for universities that don’t value freedom of speech. And no more funding for those degrees that don’t benefit the UK economy or don't give graduates a job.”

“Instead, that money will be put where it matters, into our vocational and our technical skills revolution, directly funding and building the new medical schools to train the doctors of the future, the apprentices of the future,” she said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com