Recommendation 11

The Department has yet to publish a long-term plan to improve the resilience of the health and social care workforce. Our NHS nursing workforce report, published in September 2020, noted that there had been further delay to the overdue NHS People Plan, which was originally due to be published in 2019 and still had not been published. We also found that there was a risk that the NHS was focusing on short-term pressures at the expense of the necessary long-term strategy. We recommended that NHSE&I and Health Education England prioritise publication of the substantive long-term workforce plan as soon as possible utilising the NHS’s existing long-term funding allocations.23 In its response, the government noted that the NHS People Plan was an ongoing programme of work and that in July 2020, NHSE&I and Health Education England published the next stage of this programme, We are the NHS: People Plan 2020/21 – action for us all. This set out the national and local steps that needed to be taken for the rest of 2020–21 to support staff in the NHS and help manage the pressures of COVID-19 through the winter of 2020– 21.24 We asked the Department if it was formulating a plan in terms of numbers of people 19 COVIDA Study (Ev ILG012) 20 Committee of Public Accounts, Readying the NHS and social care for the COVID-19 peak, Fourteenth Report of Session 2019–21, HC 405, 29 July 2020 21 HM Treasury, Treasury Minutes: Government responses to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth reports and the Nineteenth report from Session 2019–21, CP 316, November 2020 22 Qq 80–83 23 Committee of Public Accounts, NHS nursing workforce, HC 408, Session 2019–21, 23 September 2020, para 1 24 HM Treasury, Treasury Minutes: Government responses to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Eighteenth and the Twentieth to the Twenty-Fourth reports from Session 2019–21, CP 363, January 2021 Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic 13 needed to cre