THE number of GPs in England has dropped by 700 over the past 12 months and there are 107,000 NHS vacancies still unfilled, Labour warned today.

Speaking in the Commons during health questions, shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth demanded that cuts to training budgets be reversed in the forthcoming NHS long-term plan.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock was reprimanded by the UK Statistics Authority last week for falsely claiming in a tweet that there were an additional 1,000 GPs across the NHS in England. He subsequently deleted the tweet.

Mr Ashworth said: “I know the Secretary of State got into a muddle last week on his GP figures — so perhaps can I suggest he downloads an exciting new app to his phone: it’s called the calculator.

“Now, on the point about more for community and primary care by 2024, can he today guarantee that there will be the extra GPs and extra district nurses to provide those services he is promising?”

Mr Hancock claimed that there were record numbers of GPs in training and a record number of nurses in the NHS, adding: “We want to do more and we will.”

Day-to-day spending on the wider health budget is set to fall by £1 billion in real terms next year. This includes cuts to the workforce training budget, according to the Health Foundation.

The training budget has dropped by 4.7 per cent over the past five years, according to research undertaken by the House of Commons Library. In real terms, Health Education England has been forced to reduce its spending by 7.6 per cent between 2013/14 and 2017/18.

Labour said that its new analysis exposes the government’s “blase attitude to the workforce crisis.”

Lamiat Sabin is Morning Star parliamentary reporter.