Composing motion 48 plus amendment and motion 49
Congress notes that NHS organisations – often the largest employer in local areas – are crucial for the provision of early career, clinical and support worker roles.
Secure, well-unionised, early career roles are vital for young people. They are also the entry points onto the clinical pathways that serve our population’s diverse health needs.
However, Congress notes that these pathways are increasingly blocked by recruitment freezes and short-term cuts.
The percentage of physiotherapy staff facing recruitment freezes rose from 39 per cent to 65 per cent in 2025 alone. Jobs are particularly scarce for new graduates, who are now significantly more likely to still be job-hunting six months after qualifying than the 2022 cohort.
Congress believes job freezes are bad for patients – the NHS 10-year plan cannot be delivered without expanding the physiotherapy workforce, let alone while cutting it. They are bad for local labour markets and deepen regional inequalities – with many young people, care leavers and residents of deprived boroughs experiencing entrenched unemployment.
Congress notes that seven per cent of physiotherapy staff leave the NHS annually – a higher rate than nursing – with half of these leaving within the first five years of their careers.
Most of these leavers remain state registered as physiotherapists, but their skills are lost to the NHS and its patients.
Congress believes that a service linked loan-forgiveness scheme – available to staff joining the NHS, its sub-contracted services, local government and charities – would help the public sector retain early-career physiotherapists and other clinical staff.
Congress believes such a scheme would be economically progressive: in 2023, the government was warned that incoming changes to student finances – including the lowering of the repayment threshold to £25,000 earnings and extending repayment terms from 30 to 40 years – would cost low- and middle-earning physiotherapy staff a projected £30,000, and effective operating as a regressive graduate tax.
To strengthen the NHS’s role as an anchor institution for local youth employment, Congress calls on the TUC to lobby the Department of Health and Social Care to:
i. extend the nursing and midwifery graduate guarantee to newly qualified physiotherapists and Allied Health Professionals
ii. require and fund integrated care systems to coordinate place-based recruitment strategies with local authorities, universities and local statutory duty bearers
iii. Ensure adequate and fair devolved funding, and reflected accountability, to secure this across all of the UK nations.
Congress calls on the TUC to work with the Treasury and the Department for Education to introduce a service-linked loan forgiveness scheme for physiotherapy staff and other clinicians working in the NHS and wider public sector.
Mover: Chartered Society of Physiotherapy
Seconder: SoR