Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I would not go so far as to say that it is a willy-nilly thing. There was certainly an acceleration to try to recruit to as many disciplines as possible, particularly coming out of the pandemic and given the growth in services that was necessary. Generally, we are recruiting a multidisciplinary team in nearly every part of the health and social care sector and, therefore, we go out and look to get, for example, as many physios or OTs as we can. I would not use the term “willy-nilly”, but it probably had that appearance because of the absence of a full-control environment.

Equally, I have never heard so many problems in the history of the health service being attributed to a recruitment pause that came in last October. Audiology has been a consistent problem since my first management job in 2003. It will remain so for some time because of the volume versus the available skill set. People ask when the pause will end. What will be clear in the future, and I will be unequivocal about this, is that the funded workforce of the service will be X. That is not to say that is everything we need, but that is what it is. If the control operates within that, there will not be any need for these kinds of arbitrary decisions around pauses. Adding to it is a different decision, and those are matters for the Government later, but the workforce has never been bigger. There has been an explosion in the past four years. We have to see what it is we are getting from that to the benefit of the public, as well as just recruiting more.