After meeting with the Chair of the NHS Pay Review Body this morning, the Health and Social Care Select Committee, to which I was recently appointed, met with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay this afternoon. In between the two meetings I took the opportunity to meet with ambulance workers who were in Parliament to talk with MPs on a lobby organised by the GMB.

I drew on my conversation with ambulance staff, who had talked about the pressures on the service and numbers leaving it, when questioning the Health Secretary – opening up the issue to press him on the way that the refusal to properly pay NHS staff was affecting the ability to retain staff across health and care. I also pressed him on the Government’s failure to deliver on the much-promised plan to fix our broken social care system.