Grand Committee
Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Geddes)
My Lords, before the first Motion is considered, I remind your Lordships that in the case of all the statutory instruments, the Motion before the Committee will be that the Committee do consider the statutory instrument in question. In the case of the first statutory instrument, further proceedings in the Chamber would need to be tabled for further action to ensue. In the case of the other statutory instruments, the Motion to approve the instrument will be moved in the Chamber in the usual way. As is normal on these occasions, I should also announce that if there is a Division in the House, the Committee will adjourn for 10 minutes.
Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules
(13 years ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Rosser
That the Grand Committee do consider the Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules.
Relevant documents: 40th and 41st Reports from the Merits Committee.
Lord Rosser
First, I apologise for the absence of my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. He is involved in the health bill and does not know how long the issue being discussed in the Chamber will last. It may well be brief, in which case he will be required in the Chamber.
The statement of changes to Immigration Rules has been the subject of consideration by the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee. The Merits Committee, of which I am a former chairman, drew the changes to the special attention of your Lordships’ House on the grounds that they give rise to issues of public policy likely to be of interest to the House. However, in its conclusion, the Committee also stressed the importance of providing appropriate levels of explanation and visibility for Parliament.
The statement of changes makes a number of amendments to the Immigration Rules, but the most significant is a provision that a person subject to immigration control who has failed to pay NHS charges of £1,000 or more in respect of NHS treatment charges should normally be refused permission to enter or remain in this country, or have their leave cancelled.
The Merits Committee states that the consultation on this issue produced important comments from stakeholders. It noted that the document on the United Kingdom Border Agency website, giving the results of the consultation, provided a relatively full and balanced account of the consultation outcome. However, the Committee went on to say that it was regrettable that this was not matched in the Explanatory Memorandum laid before Parliament, and that furthermore, given the importance of some of the issues raised in the consultation, Parliament could reasonably expect the United Kingdom Border Agency to have used the Explanatory Memorandum to provide greater reassurance that the policy will achieve its objectives.
It would be helpful if the Minister could explain why the Explanatory Memorandum did not match up to the level and standard of information on the consultation outcome provided on the website. Or is it his view that this is not the case and that, as far as Home Office Ministers are concerned, the Merits Committee is being unreasonable? That might well be the view of Home Office Ministers, bearing in mind this is by no means the first time that the Merits Committee has been less than impressed with the quality and completeness of information provided to them by the Home Office, and so far there appears to be an inability by Home Office Ministers to rectify the situation.
The Merits Committee was not alone in expressing its concerns on this point. The committee received a letter from the British Medical Association about the change in respect of outstanding NHS charges, which stated that it had submitted a detailed response to the Department of Health consultation and raised some general points by letter to the United Kingdom Border Agency in response to its parallel consultation.
The British Medical Association said that it had concerns with respect to the way comments relating to the proposed legislation had been represented, particularly in the Explanatory Memorandum accompanying the statement, which it did not think had adequately represented the balance of comments it had submitted. The Explanatory Memorandum states that the British Medical Association supported the proposals in principle and that,
“the introduction of changes to the Immigration Rules to promote payment of NHS debt seems reasonable”.
The letter from the BMA went on to say that it had raised significant concerns, in particular over the detrimental impact such changes could have on the engagement of vulnerable groups with health services, which were not reflected in the Explanatory Memorandum. Significantly, the Merits Committee went on to say that it shared the BMA's concerns about the United Kingdom Border Agency's representation of the BMA's position in the Explanatory Memorandum. Is the Minister, too, concerned about the representation of the BMA's position in the memorandum, or will he go on the record as saying that the memorandum adequately represented the balance of comments submitted by the BMA—contrary to the views of both the BMA and the Merits Committee?
The Merits Committee report makes it clear that in order to get a better understanding of how the consultation fed into the policy development process, the committee had to seek further information from UKBA about concerns raised during the consultation, as well as about any risks and remaining dissatisfaction with the proposed changes. That further inquiry elicited information that was not contained in the Explanatory Memorandum: namely, that concerns have been expressed, including by the BMA, that an unintended consequence of the rule change might be that it would act as a deterrent for migrants to seek necessary medical care, and that three organisations had raised issues of confidentiality and/or of data protection. The issue of confidentiality was most actively highlighted by HIV/AIDS representative groups because in their view HIV/AIDS is a stigmatised condition.
The committee also received a submission from the National Aids Trust saying that the new rules would have a serious impact on public health by dissuading migrants with HIV from accessing testing and treatment. The National Aids Trust was also of the view that the rules might lead to unlawful discrimination against disabled migrants and indicated that it may mount a legal challenge on these grounds. Will the Minister say if the Government considered whether the new rules could be regarded as constituting unlawful discrimination in relation to any groups or categories of individuals?
Since UKBA said that the rule change was drafted so that an NHS debt would not result in a mandatory immigration refusal, and that the new rule would be applied on a case-by-case basis, the Merits Committee also wrote to the Minister seeking a full explanation of how the new rule relating to NHS charges of £1,000 or more being applied on a case-by-case basis would operate. The committee has now reported on the reply from the Minister responsible for immigration. In the light of that reply, its latest report states:
“The Committee notes that the guidance for decision makers seems to suggest that these medical cases will result in an immigration refusal in all but rare and extreme circumstances”.
Will the Minister say whether he considers that to be a fair interpretation by the Merits Committee of the response from the Minister for immigration?
The Merits Committee undertakes valuable work on behalf of your Lordships' House, considering instruments and drawing them to the special attention of the House where necessary, in line with its terms of reference. Its report on the statement of changes to Immigration Rules raises serious issues about the Explanatory Memorandum and also makes it clear that the committee had to pursue further issues in writing because the level of explanation was less than it should have been. I hope that the Home Office and Home Office Ministers take seriously the work of the committee. If future reports contain further critical observations about the quality, accuracy and extent of the information provided by the Home Office, no doubt there will be more debates of the kind we are having today. The Minister has not been in his position for long. I hope that he will be determined to address the concerns raised by the Merits Committee in the report that we are considering, as well as the not dissimilar concerns raised in previous reports. I beg to move that the Committee do consider the statement of changes in Immigration Rules.
Lord Avebury
My Lords, before coming to the statement, I will say that as we get material changes to Immigration Rules at such frequent intervals and there is invariably a prayer tabled against each one, they ought to be made subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. I would be grateful if my noble kinsman will let us have his views on that matter.
We are considering this statement against the backdrop of several major crises hitting UKBA at the same time. There is the saga of the passport checks and the suspension of three top officials for the unannounced dropping of our guard against terrorists, money launderers and drug merchants—which now appears to have been the bright idea of the Home Secretary. Then there was the robust criticism by the chief inspector of the management of foreign national prisoners, with 1,600 being detained in January at the end of their sentences for an average length of 190 days, costing the taxpayer as much as if they had stayed in the Savoy hotel. A third of them appealed successfully against their deportation, meaning that if UKBA had made the correct decisions, it would have saved the taxpayer millions of pounds. There was the sudden revelation that the agency had discovered another 124,000 legacy cases to replace the 300,000 cases it was supposed to have dealt with over several years ending in July 2011. It is about time that we had a full-scale debate on all the catastrophes that keep engulfing UKBA, including an examination of whether the agency should be put out of its misery and its functions resumed by the Home Office. At least there would then be no question of where the buck stops.
The next general point I want to make is that this instrument, like others in the past covering changes to the Immigration Rules, is being debated after it has come into effect. Parliament cannot be seen to exercise control over legislation in these circumstances because however valid the criticisms we make, they could be accommodated by the Government only by bringing in a further order, which is unthinkable.
Turning to the statement, as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has said, the Merits Committee focuses attention on the proposal to refuse permission to enter or remain in the UK to anyone who has failed to pay NHS charges of £1,000 or more and to cancel any outstanding leave to remain for a patient who has run up that level of indebtedness to the NHS. Although the BMA supported the idea in principle, there are serious concerns over making it mandatory, irrespective of the patient's means or the nature of the illness for which she needed treatment. UKBA told the Merits Committee that it would be applied on a case-by-case basis, as the noble Lord pointed out, but has not yet received an answer to the request that the Minister should provide a full explanation of how discretion is to be exercised. I hope we are going to hear something about that from the Minister this afternoon.
An example that was given in the Merits Committee report, which has already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, is of patients with HIV/AIDS. This was raised by three organisations in the consultation, one of which was the National AIDS Trust, from whom your Lordships have now heard further. It believes that this proposal is immensely discriminatory and will have an immensely harmful impact on public health. It will cost the NHS far more in the long run because HIV-positive migrants will avoid treatment and become ill and HIV will spread within and beyond migrant communities at an estimated lifetime cost of £280,000 for each new patient becoming infected. The National AIDS Trust says the groups most affected will be asylum seekers, visa overstayers and those without papers who have often been living in the UK for years without lawful residence, not visitors who come here with the deliberate intention of getting free medical treatment.
There is nothing in the statement to cover migrants who simply could not afford to pay large medical bills. Let us take as an example a student on an English-language course lasting under six months who is involved in an accident and needs surgery and a week's hospitalisation. She could easily run up a bill of £1,000. Are we saying that her leave to remain should be abruptly terminated and her future career possibly ruined because of this accident?
If the proposal had been confined to certain categories, such as tourist visitors, who should take out medical insurance when they come to the UK, as our tourists do when they go to the US, for example, I could understand it. The impact assessment says that health and other professionals are travelling to the UK specifically to access NHS services and that in many cases they leave without paying. This means that they are identified by the NHS provider as persons who are ineligible for free medical treatment, and they could be asked to pay for it in advance.
There are a lot of other changes, most of which it seems are to correct errors in previous instruments, but some, whether acknowledged or not, are to accommodate judgments of the courts. It has been suggested that the amendments dealing with the evidence that has to be produced by tier 2 migrants and work permit holders was inspired by the case of Pankina. Although that is not stated to be so, perhaps my noble friend will confirm that it is so. There are amendments dealing with spouses and civil partners, among which is one to reinsert a paragraph that was accidentally knocked out in a previous statement that was considered earlier this year. I am sure that that is not the whole story because paragraphs do not get knocked out by accident and it would be useful if my noble friend could probe this further with UKBA to avoid any repetition of that event, at a time when it is so accident- prone.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for introducing this debate and also my noble kinsman Lord Avebury for his comments. I start with the Merits Committee and its complaints about this. Many years ago, I was a member of what is still, I think, called the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, which is a relatively toothless body as regards considering the merits of particular statutory instruments. When I was a member of the Government led in this House by my noble friend the then Lord Cranborne—who is now the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury—I was very proud that we brought in the Merits Committee precisely so that it could look at the merits of statutory instruments. That was some time in the mid-1990s, and a very good job it has done over the years. Therefore, we are very concerned about complaints relating to orders that we have put forward and we take them very seriously. The complaints on this occasion are largely about the Explanatory Memorandum, whether we think that was adequate and whether it misrepresented the position of various others. I thought that that Explanatory Memorandum was adequate, but if complaints have been made about it by the Merits Committee we will have to take that seriously. We will have to up our game and no doubt make sure that we do better in the future.
I was grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, referred to the letter from my honourable friend Damian Green, which was sent to the Merits Committee after its 40th and 41st reports on this matter and dealt with many of those complaints. I am grateful that it has now been made available to the House and is published on the Merits Committee’s website. As I have said, we will obviously take these matters seriously and will look at the criticisms that it made.
My noble kinsman Lord Avebury also objected to the fact that the statement of changes was subject to the negative procedure and not to the affirmative procedure. I am afraid that we will have to go back in time to the original legislation that created them as negative resolutions rather than primary. I do not know when that was but if we want to change that, it would obviously be a matter for primary legislation. I do not think that there is any Henry VIII power for me unilaterally to change them. That is why I say to my noble kinsman that one of the reasons why very often one has to debate these matters after they have come into effect is that the order comes into effect on a certain date and there should be time for Members of both Houses either to pray against them or to have a debate of this sort in the Moses Room.
I should now like to turn to the substantive questions on the statement of changes to the Immigration Rules and set out our case because it would be useful for the Committee to know why we are doing what we are doing. As all will be aware, the National Health Service is the national health service and its resources in these straitened times are limited. It is right that it should be shielded against misuse by those who incur and fail to pay charges in compliance with law.
The NHS debtors rule is being introduced for a number of important reasons. First, it will deter overseas visitors from misusing the NHS; that is, to deal with the problem of health tourism. Secondly, it will ensure that overseas visitors understand their need to meet their obligations to pay for the NHS services they use. Thirdly, it will reassure the public that we are determined to operate fair and robust controls on migrants’ access to public benefits and services. Finally, it will enable other patients to benefit indirectly from the recovery of NHS resources. That, again, is an important point and we must always remember that those resources are finite.
The rules must also be seen in the context of the joint UK Border Agency and the Department of Health review of migrant access to health services. Following this review and public consultations by the Department of Health and the border agency last year, the NHS charging regulations for England have been amended. This amendment provides extra protection for potentially vulnerable groups, including failed asylum seekers supported by the United Kingdom Border Agency and children from overseas who are in the care of a local authority. They are no longer liable for NHS charges.
I recognise concerns raised that the new rules may deter migrants from seeking necessary medical care. I must stress that although these rules relate to the entire United Kingdom, those relating to the NHS will vary in the four different parts of the UK. In England, primary care as provided by GPs, treatment in accident and emergency departments, and most treatments carried out on public health grounds are free of charge. Furthermore, urgent or immediately necessary treatment must not be delayed over the question of payment.
The United Kingdom Border Agency also has an important role to play in protecting the economy and publicly funded services and their lawful users from the consequences of inappropriate access. The equality statement that was published with the laying of the rules outlines the Government’s view that the rules are a proportionate measure in pursuance of this legitimate policy objective. Nevertheless, all cases will be considered on their individual merits with decision-makers afforded discretion to take account of exceptional compassionate factors and obliged to apply human rights legislation, as we always do, and equality legislation. Applicants will remain able, as now, to raise any compelling compassionate circumstances which they consider pertinent to their application, and these will be considered, as is current practice.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, suggested that these changes were discriminatory and raised the question of treatment for HIV. I have made it clear that the underlying policy objective, that of protecting publicly funded services for those with a lawful claim to them, makes this a proportionate response. Medical information will not be shared between the NHS and the UKBA. However, it will remain open, as now, for applicants to raise any compassionate or medical factors that they consider pertinent to their applications. We will review the question as to whether people living with HIV and not ordinarily resident here should be exempted from their charges for HIV treatment.
I believe that we need robust controls to protect our public services, just as we need robust controls in other aspects of the control of our borders, as was made clear by the responses in another place to the Statement made by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and in this House when I repeated that Statement earlier this week. Not only do we need to protect public services, it is also right that if someone does not pay the charges they incur for treatment, they should normally be refused any further immigration applications until they have paid their debt.
I hope that that deals with most of the questions that have been raised. I understand the concerns and I go back to the complaints made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, quoting from the report of the Merits Committee about our Explanatory Memorandum. As I said, if we got that wrong, we will try to do better in the future. With that assurance, I hope that the noble Lord will accept that this is a satisfactory and proportionate response to these issues.
Lord Avebury
As my noble friend is dealing with the question of NHS charges, does he have a reply to my question about whether, under the Olympics rules, GFMs will be exempt from them?
Lord Henley
My Lords, if I may, I would prefer to write to my noble kinsman on that point. My understanding from discussions I had earlier with officials is that we are all right under the IOC rules, but if I am wrong on that, I will write to him.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, I will be brief. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for his contribution to the debate and the Minister for his reply, including his statement that regard will be paid to the concerns expressed by the Merits Committee, in particular over the Explanatory Memorandum. That is all I wish to say in response.
Local Authorities (Contracting Out of Community Infrastructure Levy Functions) Order 2011
Baroness Hanham
That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Local Authorities (Contracting Out of Community Infrastructure Levy Functions) Order 2011.
Relevant documents: 29th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lords, the community infrastructure levy allows local authorities to choose to charge a levy on new development in their area in order to raise funds needed to meet the demands of hosting that development and, in turn, to enable growth. The levy was introduced by the previous Government through the Planning Act 2008. Part 2 of that Act provides for regulations to allow the imposition of the levy. The Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 made the first use of those powers bringing the levy into effect from 6 April 2010.
The instrument before the Committee today allows local authorities, if they so wish, to contract other parties to deliver most of the activities they carry out under the community infrastructure levy regulations. The draft instrument is entirely consistent with other contracting-out legislation, made under the same powers, for contracting out of functions concerning the administration and enforcement of the business improvement district levy and council tax and non-domestic rates. Both instruments were considered by this Committee.
The objective of the order is to provide levy authorities with the scope to contract out specified functions and thereby give them the means to meet their responsibility to ensure best value. The order is of interest primarily to community infrastructure levy charging and collecting authorities. We consulted the Local Government Association and representatives of other levy authorities which welcomed the approach proposed by the draft order.
Where an authority chooses to contract another body to undertake a function, that body then does so on the authority’s behalf; that is, the contractor acts as an agent of the authority to undertake the function it is contracted to deliver. Article 3 makes this fact clear by requiring that where a contractor, in doing the work that the authority has contracted him to do, enters into an agreement with another person, that agreement has to make it clear that the agreement is between the authority and the person, not the contractor and the person.
It is possible to contract out only functions that an authority can delegate to a committee, sub-committee or officer, not functions that the authority itself must carry out. Where legislation requires a meeting of the authority—or, in the case of the Mayor of London, the mayor—to approve, that function cannot be contracted out. Article 4 of the draft order reflects these restrictions and reiterates that such functions may not be contracted to another party. The effect is that an authority cannot contract out its functions to propose, implement or withdraw a community infrastructure levy charge in its area or delegate its power to ask a court to consider imprisoning a levy debtor.
These safeguards mean that decisions concerning whether to raise a charge, including at what level the charge should be set and whether to continue to do so, are for the authority and it cannot delegate it. The draft instrument has no effect concerning the spending of levy receipts; the community infrastructure levy regulations already provide for authorities to pass funds to any person they choose and, where they do so, the authority remains responsible for ensuring they are applied appropriately. The functions that this order allows to be contracted out include: gathering evidence to support consideration of whether and at what rate to apply a charge; the administration of the charge, including processes for notifying, collecting and enforcing liabilities; and the administration of the resultant funds.
The order provides local authorities with the flexibility to ensure that their responsibilities are delivered in the most effective and efficient manner possible, be that in-house or through another party. It allows for a competitive process to be undertaken, which will provide authorities with the scope to drive down costs and drive up standards. Importantly, the order does not allow for decisions concerning whether and at what rate to charge a levy on development in an area to be delegated or create scope for another body to spend the proceeds.
I am satisfied that the order is compatible with the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights. I beg to move.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, the order itself is not controversial, so I do not envisage a long debate on it. However, I have a few brief comments to make. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, has advised the Grand Committee, primary powers were taken in the Planning Act 2008 to enable the Government to make regulations allowing local planning authorities to set a levy for their area to be paid by the owners and developers of land in order to contribute to the provision of the infrastructure needed to support development or planning in their area. The process was being determined, but the general election got in the way. Local authorities will have the ability to outsource all or part of their functions related to the levy, except where they are specifically prevented from contracting out that function.
I am aware that there has been a consultation process and that all the responses support this preferred option. I have one question for the noble Baroness which revolves around the review. I see that the review of the levy itself is scheduled for 2015. Is the noble Baroness satisfied that that will be soon enough, and were local authorities consulted on that particular point?
Baroness Maddock
My Lords, as a former member of the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, at times I take a keen interest in secondary legislation. This is in an area that I was involved in when I was on the Front Bench, so I have taken a particular interest in it. It has already been said that the order is not controversial. The main legislation was the Planning Act 2008, followed by the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010. I wonder whether it was flagged up, particularly in the main legislation, that later on this is how things would happen. One of the reasons the Merits Committee does such a good job is because legislation in recent times has become more and more complicated, and more of the detail comes out in secondary legislation. My noble friend and I have been involved in local government legislation over the years, and we know how difficult this has been. Again, I wonder whether the way in which this was going to be enacted was flagged up in the primary legislation.
I have one another minor question, which might be a little pernickety—I must account for it by saying that I have served on the Merits Committee. I notice that the consultation period was only six weeks. The statutory consultation period is quite often 12 weeks. I have not looked at it closely enough to know whether this was the correct period, and I understand that the Local Government Association and others were consulted, so there are no issues around it. However, I would like to know whether that was the correct period of consultation.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord and the noble Baroness for their questions. I shall start with my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy: 2015 is considered reasonable given that the first charges will start in the new year, 2012, and that time is needed to allow the arrangements to bed down before they are reviewed. Effectively, they will have three years in which to do so.
The noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, is probably more familiar with the 2008 legislation than I am since I expect she was there, but like me, she may not remember it. The consultation period of six weeks was set out in the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994, so it fell within the normal parameters, and indeed the Local Government Association was consulted as well. I hope that noble Lords will be content with those replies.
West Northamptonshire Development Corporation (Area and Constitution) (Amendment) Order 2011
Baroness Hanham
That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation (Area and Constitution) (Amendment) Order 2011.
Relevant documents: 29th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lords, the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Communities and Local Government and was established in 2004. Its purpose is to secure the regeneration of West Northamptonshire, an area identified for regeneration and economic growth, where population is growing at twice the national average.
Over time, the corporation has done a lot of good work, and I recognise all those who have been involved, but this Government’s approach is to promote more locally-led arrangements in a way that does not put at risk key delivery projects. Our priority is the economic growth and potential of West Northamptonshire’s priority sectors, including high-performance engineering. We want to encourage the area’s unique opportunities, including Silverstone, the logistics “golden triangle” and Northampton Waterside Enterprise Zone. The corporation has been very successful in delivering a range of projects to date, resulting in £70 million of infrastructure improvements, levering in a further £200 million of private sector investment, getting approval for up to 10,000 new homes and creating of 2,500 jobs.
For long-term success, this growth needs to be locally led, partly through the local enterprise partnership and partly through the local authorities. This order is a step towards that goal. The purpose of the order is to reduce the size of the board of the corporation from 11 members in addition to the chairman and deputy chairman to seven members in addition to the chairman and deputy chairman. Of the seven remaining board members, six will continue to be reserved for nominated representatives of the four local authorities, maintaining the commitment given to the Lords Select Committee during the passage of the 2004 order. The remaining board member, chair and deputy chair will continue to be appointed through open competition if the need arises, although we do not expect there to be a need for a further round of appointments.
The amendment will bring local authority members into a majority on the board and is another step on the path of the reform of the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation that will see its transition from a statutory body to a local authority delivery vehicle by the end of 2013-14—that is, on 1 April 2014 —in line with the announcement made on the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation as part of the public bodies review in October 2010.
I recognise that there are always arguments for and against a particular date. There are those who would want to see an earlier date and others who want the corporation to continue for longer. I believe that this approach strikes the right balance in supporting regeneration investment at its most critical stage and that the corporation should plan to this timetable. The process for change has already begun with the return of the first phase of statutory planning powers from the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation to the local authorities in April 2011. The full return of planning powers will be completed in April 2012, subject to the completion of negotiations with the local authorities and parliamentary approval.
After the full return of planning powers, the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation will focus on using its statutory powers to take forward five key projects in Northampton. By the end of 2013-14, we expect these projects will transfer to the local authority vehicle for completion. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation for its continuing co-operation in addressing these issues and in working towards new arrangements for the future. I beg to move.
Lord Boswell of Aynho
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her entirely satisfactory explanation of this order and for setting up what is a pragmatic and well considered timetable for evolutionary change. My reasoning in troubling the Committee for a few moments is that, at the time of the inception of the corporation in 2004, I was the constituency Member of Parliament for Daventry, which embraced two of the three areas involved, Daventry and Towcester, but not, of course, the borough of Northampton; nor was I at any stage a member of the overarching local authority, the county council. But I have taken an interest in this as a concept and I am pleased that it is developing as it is.
I thought that the then Labour Minister, in introducing the order, fairly characterised my approach as being one of what he then called pragmatic acquiescence. That is where I am today: I am happy to have the corporation, but I am equally happy to see it evolve back into local authority control. I would also record its achievements over time which have been rooted in common sense in not throwing its weight around and in working wherever possible, for example, on the planning powers with local authorities, moving from a degree of misunderstanding to a much better understanding. I suppose it is incumbent on my new status that I should say for the record that I have not consulted my two very good successors—the constituency was split in the shape of Mr Heaton-Harris in Daventry and Andrea Leadsom in Towcester—or indeed the Northampton MPs, or the development corporation itself. I am happy with the way it is shaping up. Of course, the order will streamline the corporation, which is to be welcomed.
As regards what might be termed the mission and the geography of the situation, my noble friend has already touched on the way in which it has—not been solved—been helped to take forward the agenda for the two parts of the corporation that used to be constituent within my old constituency. We are very lucky indeed to have two new university technical colleges, one in Daventry and one in Silverstone which adjoins Towcester. They are both concerned with technology and advanced engineering, about which I feel very strongly. That is part of the mission for that part of the world.
The Minister has already explained that the main thrust of the continuing activities of the corporation will be in Northampton. I tread carefully here because I would not wish to trespass on a potential non-pecuniary interest which I might have at some stage. I am aware, partly because of connections that I still have around there, of some very imaginative thinking in relation to possible uses of that large tract of land which is not derelict but underused in and around the riverside in Northampton, or the waterside, which constitutes broadly the enterprise zone. There are huge opportunities there; not necessarily the ones that I have heard about but at least there are options for some imaginative concepts. I know that the development corporation is one of the landowners and it may well have a role in assembling other packages or the infrastructure in support of that. I would welcome that and I think that in itself is sufficient justification for its continuation.
I put down one marker of concern. As I think the Minister will know, there is a long history of flooding in Northampton. After the disastrous floods in 1998 which resulted in fatalities, some of that was ameliorated by investment by the Environment Agency. Privately, I would have said to people that this is not merely a technical matter to resolve—although as a former Minister for flood defence, I am aware that there are technical solutions to these problems—but it is also a political matter, although political with a small “p”. If there is major investment in the area, people will have to be convinced that it is viable and that those who live there or pass through it are not at any risk. That is something that has not been attractive for the town and which has not been of economic use. Before closing, I should perhaps mention for the amusement of the Committee that I was once somewhat instrumental in bulking up quantities of grain that were stored in the disused power station and then transported on the railway line, which is now discontinued. That was about 30 years ago, but there has not been much joy out of there over the past few decades and I think the time is coming for an imaginative project and for the evolution of this corporation, which is a rather unusual one, back into local authority ambit and control. It would be a fitting finale to have this particular set of projects safely landed, so I strongly support the Minister.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, as noble Lords will be aware, this is one of only three urban development corporations in the UK and the only one outside London. West Northamptonshire Development Corporation has a number of wide-ranging powers. These come under three clear headings: investment, planning and development. The corporation has brought considerable sums of money into the local community, in excess of £70 million. It determines strategic planning applications and has wide-ranging powers, including the ability to acquire, manage and sell land and property.
As I have advised noble Lords before, in my previous occupation I spent many happy years in the East Midlands. It is an area I know reasonably well, but obviously not as well as the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, although I do of course agree with the remarks he just made to the Grand Committee. The purpose of the order is to reduce the size of the board from 11 to seven members in addition to the chair and deputy chair. I am content with that, but I would like to confirm one thing, although I am sure the answer will be yes. Have the local authorities been consulted and are they happy with this? Obviously, if they are, I am content with the order.
Finally, I thank the officials at the department. A couple of days ago I asked them some questions about this and a previous order. I got the information back very quickly and I was very happy with that.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I am extremely grateful for the general support for these orders and I understand very well about the close interest of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, in this area. Regarding the flooding, I cannot do anything about his bales of hay, I am afraid. The corporation will need to talk to the relevant bodies, including the Environment Agency and any local people who are affected, so I hope he will be reassured about that. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for his response. Yes, the local authorities have been consulted. They are now going to be the major presence on the corporation, so they will be content with that. I thank the noble Lord for his comments about the department; we are always very happy to help.
Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (Disclosure of Pupil Information by Welsh Ministers) Regulations 2011
(13 years ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (Disclosure of Pupil Information by Welsh Ministers) Regulations 2011.
Relevant documents: 28th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, these regulations, which are being considered together with the Statistics and Registration Service Act (Disclosure of Value Added Tax Information) Regulations 2011, are the third and fourth uses of the data-sharing powers under the 2007 Act and the first time that the powers have been used by the current Government. The Welsh school pupils’ regulations make possible the sharing with the Office for National Statistics of data on individual pupils attending schools in Wales. The ONS is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, which is referred to in the legislation as the Statistics Board. The regulations follow those made in 2009 that allowed the ONS to access information on pupils attending schools in England.
Access to these data will enable the ONS to improve the accuracy of mid-year estimates and projections of population for local areas in Wales, to develop ongoing research as part of the Beyond 2011 programme, which is to consider possible alternatives to the traditional census in producing census-type statistics and to improve the assessment of the quality of statistics on schoolchildren from the 2011 census.
The other regulations being debated today allow the ONS to receive certain information provided to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in VAT returns. This will enable the ONS to improve its business and economic statistics and to reduce the burden on businesses, some of which will no longer need to supply this information in addition to other information through regular returns to the ONS. The data will also be used for economic analysis and to make improvements to various business surveys run by the ONS.
The regulations permit the sharing of a long run of VAT data submitted to HMRC on or after 1 October 1985 to provide a better economic understanding of the whole economic cycle. Data confidentiality and security arrangements are being assessed as a fundamental part of the preparation of the data-sharing agreement between the organisations concerned. The ONS already works to very tight confidentiality guidelines and has an excellent data security record. It has put the necessary measures in place to protect the data and to ensure that there is no disclosure of any personal information about specific pupils or businesses.
Section 39 makes it an offence for a member or employee of the authority, including the ONS, to disclose personal information it holds other than in tightly defined circumstances. Any unlawful disclosure could result in imprisonment and/or a fine. Both sets of regulations enable administrative data already collected by government to be further utilised but only for the purposes set out in the regulations; that is, for the ONS to improve the statistics it produces on the population and on the economy.
In summary, providing the ONS with access to data on Welsh pupils and businesses’ VAT data will lead to improvements in the accuracy of the statistics that it produces and to efficiencies which will benefit government and society as a whole. Better statistics will inform better policy making. I therefore ask the Committee to support and accept both regulations. I beg to move.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, I have no intention whatever of objecting to these regulations, but I should be grateful for one or two points of clarification on the ONS regulations. First, I noted the emphasis placed by the Minister on data confidentiality, which obviously is central to all this. I note that in Regulation 2, the list of details about the pupil that will be made available excludes, of course, the pupil’s home address, presumably because of the dangers that exist. Yet, it includes the postcode. Certainly, with the name of Wigley and a postcode in my area, it would be fairly clear who that person is, although it may be more difficult with the Evanses and the Joneses. Given that, there cannot be a watertight assertion of data confidentiality.
My second point is in regard to Regulation 2(a)(vii), which refers to the,
“ethnic group and source of that information”.
I am not quite sure what is meant by the “source of that information”, but I imagine that it could be a matter for some consternation. Is the Minister in a position to tell me why? If not, perhaps he would be good enough to drop me a note about it because I realise that I may be splitting some hairs on these matters.
Lord Tunnicliffe
My Lords, the Minister will be delighted to know that I do not intend to oppose or object to these regulations. I can see the relief on his face at that statement. I will make a few comments on the reasoning and the likely outputs, and just touch on the confidentiality point.
The mood of the Explanatory Memorandum seems to suggest that the Welsh regulation—I will only talk to the Welsh regulation—is to facilitate the Beyond 2011 Programme. It does not quite say it, but the language of the Explanatory Memorandum seems almost to suggest that the decision has already been made not to have the 2021 census. In this day and age there are probably three reasons for having a census. The first is as a source of information for decision making. I have looked at the Beyond 2011 Programme and the sense of trying to produce something of equivalent capability for decision making is there in the terms of reference, and that is good.
We have also moved on in what the census is used for. The census has become highly valued in our society for academics, for what it can tell us about history, for the insights produced by past censuses— I am not sure what the correct plural is—that the academics have been able to glean, and the extent to which many citizens of this country find great value in being able to look back into their past, their families and the history of their surroundings. I hope the Government have not made the decision to abandon the 2021 census yet, and I hope that in making that decision they will take all considerations into account, including those that are of value to individuals as well as to the decision-making bureaucracy. Perhaps I should say administration—I would not call it bureaucracy because I like administrations.
My second question is: what are they going to collect? The terms are probably well defined in some administration Act, but I would be grateful if the Minister would flesh them out a bit. The two things that stand out are the ethnic group and the source of that information, and what we mean for these purposes. My wife was foolish enough to buy some tickets to the Millennium Stadium, so I have to be partly Welsh in this. I am not sure whether Welshness is ethnic or not, but as sure as hell it is sensitive. Is a sense of Welshness or Celticness part of what is being gathered here, as well as other things? Clearly it is an important issue in the country. What do we mean by the “source of that information”?
The second area is what is almost the political correctness around asking about a pupil’s level of fluency in English where their first language is neither English nor Welsh. I see that if your first language is neither English nor Welsh, fluency in English is quite important. However, fluency in English is also important if your first language is Welsh, because in the United Kingdom the extent of fluency in English must be important information about the way people live in the wider community. We move about this land from Wales to England. If one is gathering information about fluency in languages, one should gather it comprehensively. We have a peculiar situation where, as I read it, if you are fluent in Welsh your fluency in English is not even a consideration.
Lord Wigley
Before the noble Lord leaves that point, I say that I go along with what he says on the need to ascertain fluency in English. However, given the growing importance of the Welsh language in Wales, would he accept that there would be an equal case for ascertaining fluency in Welsh?
Lord Tunnicliffe
I certainly see that the people of Wales might think that there would be an equal case—and because I am not a brave person, I would support that.
The Explanatory Memorandum refers to a series of outputs. Paragraph 7.4(ii) refers to,
“differentiating migrants in order to improve our understanding of moves within and between local authorities in England”.
Once again, I am not clear what a migrant is. Is it somebody moving from Shropshire to Monmouthshire, or somebody with no connection to the United Kingdom who finds themselves in Wales as the first place they come to? Does it include somebody who comes from outside the United Kingdom who goes first to England and then to Wales? What level of granularity are we talking about when it comes to migration? Are we talking about small movements or larger ones?
Finally, I must say a word or two about confidentiality. The essence of much of the data-gathering law in this country is that it puts barriers between departments so that they cannot look at each other’s data, in order to maintain confidentiality. We then break down those barriers in order to use the data in a richer way. That is an entirely reasonable thing to do, but it is equally reasonable that whenever the barriers are broken down, as they are by these regulations, we should seek assurances that we are moving forward on confidentiality. It is no secret that there were unfortunate lapses under the previous Administration. I am absolutely sure that they were not in any way malicious. We acted in good faith and I am sure that this Administration, too, will act in good faith. However, have they made progress towards being able to assure us about improved confidentiality? Are there any new techniques, audits or penalties that will allow the Minister to say that confidentiality when this barrier is taken down will be even better than it was in the past? With those few comments, we are quite happy to support the regulations.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I thank both noble Lords who have contributed to this brief debate. I feel that the issues of data sharing and data confidentiality are like the issue of the security of the Palace of Westminster. We start off in entirely contradictory directions. We want to bring as many people as possible into the building because we want to be as open as possible, but at the same time we want to maintain the highest possible level of security. It is extremely difficult to combine those aims. We all recognise that it is much the same with data. The Government collect a great deal of data and it is immensely convenient for the purposes of economic and social policy to share as much of that data as possible, but we all know of the problems of confidentiality and of allowing the state to build up a vast database that reveals everything about every individual. The previous Government passed the 2007 Act as part of the effort to reconcile these contradictory directions and to provide an independent authority which would build in the tension between what Ministers want and what is required in terms of the confidentiality of data while attempting to avoid imposing on individuals and businesses the requirement to fill in forms every other day of the week.
Perhaps I may say a little about the Beyond 2011 Programme and the future of the census. A decision has not yet been taken as to what we will do about the 2021 census, but I recognise from the papers I have read that there are a number of question marks over it. First, this year’s census cost £500 million to collect, and it is estimated that the 2021 census may cost around £1 billion. That is an issue that one has at least to consider. Secondly, the accuracy of the census has been going down from one successive census to the next because people move around much more rapidly than they used to. Preliminary estimates of the accuracy of this year’s census are that for each local authority area it is between 94 per cent and 80 per cent. When one has dropped to 80 per cent accuracy, one is into quite severe problems, particularly in terms of social policy, because it is for precisely those vulnerable communities where children do not have good English and where there are new migrants to this country, whether from Pakistan, Hungary or Patagonia, that all the different instruments of local and national government which combine to assist such communities need to be pulled together.
What is going on in the Beyond 2011 Programme is a series of experiments to see how far we can improve the accuracy of data and how far we can perhaps provide, from alternative measures, a rolling programme of surveys and estimates which will substitute for the census in the future. I recognise that the census itself has immense historical value. In our house in Saltaire, which was built in 1863, we have in the hall the five censuses from 1871 to 1911. They tell us who lived in the house, how many people there were, where they were born and so on. The documents provide a fascinating snapshot of what was happening in a mill village during that period. We would indeed lose a very interesting historical record, but resistance to filling in the census form is sadly also growing. This year we ourselves faced questions such as which of our two houses we should put down, and as our younger people come and go, we wondered who we should list as actually resident in the house.
We have been extremely speedy in getting through our statutory instruments this afternoon, and I must say that the expert officials who were going to give me advice in answering all the questions will arrive within the next half-hour. Therefore, in answer to some other questions that were put to me, it would be better for me to write to noble Lords than to offer them my half-informed impressions.
There was a good question about the definition of a pupil’s first language. Again, it is quite right to recognise not just bilingualism in Welsh and English but, as in the part of England in which I do my politics, bilingualism in Urdu and English, or a whole range of other languages; for example, in Bradford and Leeds I am very conscious that the census failed to pick up quite substantial refugee and other communities. In the last election my wife and I canvassed a street that was almost entirely inhabited by people from Burma. I do not think that had been picked up by the authorities at a national level, but the local schools knew what was going on because that was where their children were going. That is part of the reason and justification for this sort of element.
I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, perhaps on another occasion, just how large the migrant flow from Patagonia to Wales is—one of the many flows that are, as we know, going on in all directions at the moment. West Yorkshire certainly has a very large number of different communities and some of them are extremely mobile. A very large number of Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians came in the past 10 years. We do not know how many of them are still in West Yorkshire or how many of them have gone home. Again, that is the sort of thing that these sorts of surveys and statistics help us to discover.
I hope that noble Lords will accept that I will write to them about the other questions that they raised. I commend these regulations to the Committee.
Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (Disclosure of Value Added Tax Information) Regulations 2011
(13 years ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (Disclosure of Value Added Tax Information) Regulations 2011.
Relevant document: 29th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.
Al-Qaida (Asset-Freezing) Regulations 2011
(13 years ago)
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Lord Sassoon
That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Al-Qaida (Asset-Freezing) Regulations 2011.
Relevant document: 29th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.
The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)
My Lords, asset freezing is a vital and necessary global response to the threat from al-Qaeda. It is a tool to disrupt the flow of funds to al-Qaeda, helping to prevent them executing attacks and supporting their networks.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, we are committed to meeting our obligations under the UN charter, and we support the UN’s al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime. The regulations before the Committee today will ensure that we continue to meet our international obligations and prevent funds from reaching persons associated with al-Qaeda. In particular, they reflect UN Security Council Resolutions 1988 and 1999, which were agreed in June this year.
I will provide further detail on these changes. First, it is important to clarify that the regulations we are debating today do not apply to the terrorist asset-freezing regime mandated by Resolution 1373. That resolution is implemented in the UK under the Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Act 2010 passed last December. The regulations under debate apply only to the UN al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime established under UN Security Council Resolution 1267 and amended by Resolution 1333 and subsequent resolutions. That regime, established in 1999, initially applied an asset freeze only against the Taliban. It was subsequently extended by successor resolutions to apply an asset freeze against Osama bin Laden and individuals associated with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
The changes we are debating today stem from the latest periodic renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Security Council in June 2011 when it unanimously adopted Resolutions 1988 and 1989. These resolutions split the Resolution 1267 al-Qaeda and Taliban asset-freezing regime into two separate regimes, one in relation to Afghanistan and one in relation to al-Qaeda.
Resolution 1989 provides for the al-Qaeda regime, with which we are concerned today. It maintains sanctions on those individuals and entities associated with al-Qaeda who were designated under the Resolution 1267 asset-freezing regime and strengthens existing due process procedures. The improvements include the introduction of triggered sunset clauses. They will make it easier and more transparent to delist individuals who no longer meet the listing criteria and who are no longer considered to be associated with al-Qaeda. Delisting recommendations by the ombudsperson or requests by the state that made the original designation request will trigger the sunset clause. At that point the person will be delisted after 60 days unless the sanctions committee decides unanimously to maintain them on the list. Resolution 1989 also strengthens the role of the ombudsperson. The resolution recommends increased capacity for the ombudsperson’s office and greater provision by member states of information for case reviews, and encourages individuals to submit delisting petitions to the ombudsperson. The Government believe that these changes represent a very good and very necessary outcome that the UK, together with our Security Council partners, worked extremely hard to achieve.
As your Lordships are aware, the UN al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime is global in its application. All listing and delisting decisions are made by a committee of the UN Security Council, and once individuals or entities are listed, their assets must be frozen by all states as a matter of international law. Throughout the European Union, the al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime is implemented by Council Regulation (EC) No 881/2002, as subsequently amended, and is directly applicable in national law.
To implement and enforce the al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime fully in the UK, domestic regulations are needed to put in place penalties, and licensing and enforcement mechanisms. The key features of the regulations are that they define: the designated persons covered under the al-Qaeda regime; the prohibitions which apply in respect of designated persons; and the criminal penalties which apply to UK persons who breach the prohibitions. There are also provisions for the granting of licences exempting activities from the prohibitions, for the gathering and sharing of information and for allowing closed material to be employed in proceedings that challenge decisions made under the regulations.
These regulations revoke and replace the Al-Qaida and Taliban (Asset-Freezing) Regulations 2010, but I can assure your Lordships that there is no gap in the powers or penalties required to enforce the al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime in the UK. The 2010 regulations continue to have effect until the 2011 regulations come into force.
I know your Lordships understand the importance of the UK meeting its obligations to enforce the UN al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime. The regulations before the Committee are vital to meeting that obligation. Asset freezing is a critical element of the global response to the threat from al-Qaeda, and the UK fully supports the UN’s al-Qaeda asset-freezing regime. At the same time, UN Security Council Resolution 1989 strengthens existing due process procedures, which the UK has been arguing for at the Security Council.
In the Government’s view, the regulations before the Committee today represent an effective, fair and proportionate way of giving full effect to the EC regulation that meets the obligations of the Security Council resolution within the UK. I therefore commend these regulations to the Committee.
Baroness Kramer
My Lords, I have no objection to the regulations and I will take only a few moments of the Committee's time to seek clarification on a couple of points. From the perspective of my colleagues, it is clearly necessary to tackle not only terror but the funding of terror. This legislation is part of that overall approach. We are pleased to see the strengthening of due process and the sunset clauses that are part of the regulations.
I will ask a couple of very small questions. Will the Minister clarify that no practical implications of any significance will follow from separating the al-Qaeda regulations from those applying to the Taliban? Is this just a measure to fall into line with EU and UN resolutions? In moving from the umbrella of one set of regulations to the umbrella of another, will the process be seamless? Is there any possibility of a slip between the two? Obviously, we would not wish to see such an opportunity exploited.
My second question is perhaps of more interest to the wider community. Will the Minister give us some reassurance that these regulations will not put an additional burden on ordinary people? He will be very aware that the combination of anti-money laundering and anti-terror legislation has put a significant burden of cost on both individuals and businesses, not least when it comes to the long delays in fund transfers that the banks explain by saying that it is necessary for them to go through security procedures and checks, during which time the banks seem to hold on to the money and benefit from the interest rather than either party to the transaction. One must live with measures such as that, but we would all find it unfortunate to see any increase in the burden. I would appreciate reassurance on those points, but we support the regulations.
Lord Myners
My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, I have no issues of principle with this legislation. However, I would like the Minister's help on a couple of issues. The Explanatory Memorandum states that policy in the area of sanctions needs to be effective, proportionate and dissuasive. I would like the Minister to address Regulation 14(1)(a) and (b) and say whether the levels at which the penalties are set can truly be described as “dissuasive”. Given the consequences of terrorist action, the proposed penalties appear to be quite modest. I would also like the Minister to explain the level 5 standard referred to in Regulation 14(2).
I would also like to know—this is a very important issue—why a proposed breach of Regulation 8(3) by a financial institution does not incur a criminal penalty. Why are financial institutions exempted from criminal penalties while individuals are subject to them?
I turn to Regulation 9(4)(b). Can the Minister explain the criteria employed by HMT in determining an appropriate publicity strategy, and how the licences will be publicised under the regulations—specifically, where and when?
Under Regulation 20(1), how many licences are currently issued under Regulation 7 of the Al-Qaida and Taliban (Asset-Freezing) Regulations 2010, and how many have been issued under the 2010 regulations since they were passed by Parliament?
Finally, it would be helpful if the Minister would confirm that legal aid will be made available to individuals who are subject to freezing orders. The consequences of these freezing orders are draconian and chilling. It is incumbent upon us to ensure that anyone threatened with the consequences of having their assets frozen has access to appropriate legal advice. Will the Minister confirm that that will continue to qualify for legal aid?
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova
My Lords, first, I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations. Perhaps I may say immediately that this side of course supports the principle underlying these regulations, particularly as they substantially update, replicate and, to a degree, improve the regulations that were introduced by the previous Government on the same topic. Their purpose to keep in place protections for the UK against financing terrorist activity is wholly supportive. We also recognise the necessity of these regulations to maintain the UK’s criminal penalties for breaches of the underlying European Council regulation.
In discussions regarding the predecessor 2010 regulations, a tangential concern was expressed about the UN processes in designating persons on the target list. While all the time recognising that the Council regulation on which these regulations are based does not merely require a replication of the UN target list, it nevertheless takes considerable account of it. I fully appreciate what the Minister has indicated by way of improved protections at the EU side but it would be interesting to hear from the Minister, following the discussions at UN level, what particular developments have taken place in enabling challenges to be made by an individual to their being placed on the UN target list.
I endorse the observations made by my noble friend Lord Myners in relation to the areas in which he seeks clarification. In conclusion, the Opposition support the balance that these regulations strike between security and liberty.
Lord Sassoon
I am afraid that I did not quite catch the noble and learned Lord’s question and I want to try to give him the service of an answer. His noble friend asked me lots of questions but since the noble and learned Lord asked only one, I want to make sure that I got it right. Perhaps he would not mind clarifying the question.
Lord Davidson of Glen Clova
It will be my pleasure. I was seeking clarification or explication of the processes which the UN employs for putting individuals on the target list and the way in which discussions by the UK Government at the UN level have improved the potential for challenge by individuals finding themselves on the UN target list. One fully appreciates that the UN target list is not simply replicated by the EU target list. It applies its own judgment in relation to these. But, given that the EU takes considerable account of what the UN does by way of placing individuals on the target list, it would be helpful to understand how a challenge might be made by an individual at the UN level. I appreciate that this is entirely tangential but it would be interesting to know as this matter has caused concern in the past.
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I thank noble Lords very much for this focused short debate and for a number of questions which are absolutely to the point. Even though the noble and learned Lord says that his question is tangential, I do not think that it is at all. It goes to the heart of the UK’s concerns to make sure that when the UN did its review of the regime leading up to June 2011 we made sure that there were additional proper protections. I might come back to that in a minute.
I am grateful that all noble Lords recognise the importance of these regulations but it is equally clear that we should get the details right.
In answer to my noble friend Lady Kramer’s questions, I can certainly reassure her that absolutely nothing will slip through the gaps; there is nothing separating the old and the new regimes. We are putting in place something that ensures that there is a seamless continuation from the old combined resolution regime into the two separate regimes.
On whether there will be any additional burdens on ordinary people, I shall expand that to ordinary people and small businesses because it is important that small businesses do not have any additional burdens placed on them. Consistent with my previous answer, there should be no substantially changed burdens from the previous regimes. In fact, there has been some rationalisation of the drafting of the regulations in the process of coming forward with this new regulation. We continue to have a dialogue with representatives of small firms. I can reassure my noble friend on that. She also asked about the burden on people. It mainly will ensure that private individuals, who are in any way conceivably connected to this regime, have legitimate payments flowing to them. I believe that the regime will continue to ensure that that is the case.
I wondered why the noble Lord, Lord Myners, was writing away so furiously and I now understand that he was setting an exam paper for me.
Lord Sassoon
I am very grateful that, notwithstanding the earlier start time of this business, my Box team was able to get here in good time. The first questions were important ones about the penalties in the regime. I believe that prison sentences of up to two years are dissuasive. We are picking up the penalties from the previous regime and they have, therefore, been considered in the past. On the specific question about level 5, the answer is that it is a £5,000 penalty.
The noble Lord, Lord Myners, then asked about Regulation 8(3) and why there is no criminal penalty on financial institutions. Regulation 8(3) is that which requires financial institutions to tell the Treasury when they credit funds to a frozen account. Indeed, there is no criminal penalty attached to failure to comply with that requirement. Any breaches of that requirement are, I would suggest, properly dealt with as part of the FSA’s supervision of financial institutions for compliance with sanctions legislation, which is required under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, which provides a range of powers. Although the noble Lord is right to ask me the question, consideration has been taken of the link through to sanctions that are available under the FISMA regime.
The noble Lord then asked about publicity. If I understood his question correctly, general licences are all advertised on the Treasury website and so they are available to anyone who is interested. Those parties who are in any way involved in this or the other asset-freezing regimes are well aware, and have been for a number of years, of the channels through which the Treasury publicises licences and all other aspects of the regime. That continues, and the feedback that we receive suggests that the publicity mechanisms are effective.
There was a question about the number of licences that have been issued. The total number of licences that have been issued this year under both the Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Act and the al-Qaeda regime is 41. I do not have the exact split between the two regimes to hand but something of the order of a dozen were in respect of al-Qaeda designated individuals. If the noble Lord would like the exact number I would be happy to give it to him—he is shaking his head—but it is about a dozen out of 40.
Lastly, if an individual meets the normal legal aid tests then legal aid is available. These regulations have no particular impact on the availability of legal aid. It is perhaps also worth noting that legal aid is available from the European Court for challenges in respect of EU listings. Again, I believe there is no gap in the regulations. I hope that that deals with the questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Myners.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Davidson of Glen Clova, asked an important question about people getting on the list—and, I would suggest, being able to get themselves off it. Of course, in these and similar situations, getting people on the list will be a matter of some urgency. It is important that there is appropriate evidence and the UK is very concerned to see appropriate evidence produced in all the asset-freezing regimes, whether at a UN, EU or domestic level. I see cases under these regimes when they come forward and I know how seriously that is taken.
The almost more important question is about the mechanisms for challenge and for getting people delisted if appropriate. What is significant about the new regime under Resolution 1989 is that we were able to get in place, as I described in my opening speech, a series of much better protections in terms of the review processes, the way that the ombudsman role is beefed up, and so on. I feel much happier that, just as in the legislation for our domestic regime last year we were able to put in additional and important protections, so in a different regime the UN has moved in that direction. It was something that the UK pushed hard for.
I hope that I have answered the questions that have been brought up. In conclusion, these regulations provide a framework to implement the Security Council regulation effectively and properly. It is critical to enabling the UK to play its part in both preventing terrorist financing and in meeting those international obligations. Therefore, I commend these regulations to the Committee.
House of Lords
Cyprus: EU Presidency
(13 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Harrison
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they will take to ensure that both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities will be involved in Cyprus’s presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2012.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)
My Lords, as the noble Lord may be aware, President Christofias has publicly stated that he would like to achieve a settlement before Cyprus’s presidency of the European Union, and it is the United Kingdom’s hope that this is achieved to the benefit of all Cypriots. In such circumstances, both the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities will be part of Cyprus’s EU presidency.
Lord Harrison
My Lords, the United Kingdom is, thankfully, one of the guarantor powers for Cyprus, and we are in an ideal position to bring sensible people together from all sides in an attempt to ensure that the presidency of the European Union, over which Cyprus will preside from July of next year, brings credit to all members and all people in Cyprus. Will the noble Lord contemplate thinking about how to ensure that the two sides do joint planning, and that the venues for the six-month presidency are shared so that all can participate in this enterprise?
Lord Howell of Guildford
This would clearly be the ideal objective, and at the moment many people are working hard on it, including HM Government. Of course Alexander Downer is playing his role as adviser and mediator; and there was the meeting with the UN Secretary-General about a fortnight ago in which there was—I am advised to say—some progress but no breakthrough. So it was not totally negative, but obviously there is a long way to go. The next meeting is in January and we hope that there will be a further basis of agreement after that, as we move towards the kind of solution that many of us have sought and longed for for so long.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, what steps have the Government taken to remind all parties in Cyprus and around Cyprus that the dispute over the exclusive economic zone is one that should be dealt with by peaceful dialogue, not by menaces and threats? Have the British Government made known the view that the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee gives absolutely no right of unilateral intervention in a matter of this sort?
Lord Howell of Guildford
This is an extremely sensitive issue. As the noble Lord knows, the whole problem of the Levant basin and the discoveries of offshore gas in considerable quantities are relevant to a number of nations in the area. Like all parties to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, we recognise Cyprus’s sovereign rights to exploit mineral reserves within its exclusive economic zone, and we call on all parties to cease from inflammatory actions or statements. In particular we welcome President Christofias’s statement that any gas revenues that emerge—and they will emerge —will be for the benefit of all Cypriots, even in the absence of a settlement. We hope that a mechanism can be found to ensure that all Cypriots share in the proceeds of gas finds and developments in the Levant basin.
Baroness Hussein-Ece
My Lords, is the Minister aware that the present Government do not represent the whole of the island? Having joined the EU in 2004, Cyprus has six Members of the European Parliament, none of whom is a Turkish Cypriot. Does he agree that the fact that the benefits of EU membership six years on do not apply to the citizens of north Cyprus—Turkish Cypriots—is, in the words of one MEP, an ongoing scandal?
Lord Howell of Guildford
This is the kind of asymmetric situation that is bound to have arisen from the lack of a settlement and the fact that the north is not recognised as a separate state by this country and by many other countries, except Turkey. That is the problem. Somewhere in the future lies a better and happier relationship in which the bi-zonal federal solution for Cyprus is achieved and the whole of Cyprus is represented in the European Union. Somewhere beyond that, perhaps even a satisfactory Turkish relationship with the European Union will also be achieved.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, will the Minister expand a little on the question of potential Turkish accession to the EU? Can he give any prospect of success, given the position that Cyprus is taking?
Lord Howell of Guildford
We have always recognised, as I am sure the noble Lord has, that these things are intimately bound up together; and there are dangers. Certainly Turkey has stated that it would freeze further negotiations over the EU unless progress is really made on the Cyprus situation generally and unless issues such as oil and gas and the undersea boundaries can be resolved. So there is always a fragility and a danger that the negotiations between Turkey and the EU will be halted. They have been prolonged for a very long time already, and I am afraid that there are still a number of issues ahead. These things are at risk from the ugly division of Cyprus.
Lord Kilclooney
My Lords, increasingly there are doubts about Greece’s membership of the European Union, and especially of the eurozone. Did the same doubts apply to bringing Greek Cypriots into the European Union before there was a settlement with the Turkish Cypriots?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I did not quite catch the full extent of the noble Lord’s question. The aim of all of the processes in which we are involved, with the UN and Alexander Downer, is to create a bi-zonal federation that would be part of the European Union and would have the benefits, conditions and status of full membership of the European Union for a united Cyprus. I hope that that answers the noble Lord’s question.
Lord Maginnis of Drumglass
My Lords, is this not a case where we should remember that once we are in a hole, we should stop digging? Is it not time that our Government stopped digging a hole in terms of a lack of settlement in Cyprus? Was the lack of settlement not brought forward because Nikos Sampson and EOKA-B overthrew the regime of Archbishop Makarios? Why do we still pander to the Greek Cypriots and virtually ignore the Turkish Cypriots in this problem?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I honestly do not think that pander is the right word. We want to see a resolution of the problem. We are all aware of the history—the bitterness and the feelings of unfairness and injustice on both sides. We are all aware that Turkey is a major and responsible nation and would like to seek outside, as would no doubt the Greeks, to see the north and south of Cyprus united. There is no question of pandering; it is a question of working very hard to overcome bitter past differences and difficulties.
Armed Forces: Afghanistan and Libya
(13 years ago)
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Lord Lee of Trafford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government which countries are actively involved alongside United Kingdom forces in action in both Afghanistan and Libya.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Astor of Hever)
My Lords, I am sure that the whole House will wish to join me in offering sincere condolences to the families and friends of Private Matthew Haseldin, 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment; Rifleman Vijay Rai, 2nd Battalion The Royal Gurkha Rifles; Marine David Fairbrother, Kilo Company, 42 Commando Royal Marines; Lance Corporal Jonathan James McKinlay, 1st Battalion The Rifles; Sergeant Barry John Weston, Kilo Company, 42 Commando Royal Marines; Lieutenant Daniel John Clack, 1st Battalion The Rifles; Marine James Robert Wright, 42 Commando Royal Marines; Corporal Mark Anthony Palin, 1st Battalion The Rifles; and Lance Corporal Paul Watkins, 9th/12th Royal Lancers (Prince of Wales’s).
My thoughts are also with the wounded, and I pay tribute to the courage and fortitude in which they face their rehabilitation.
On my noble friend’s Question, as of October 2011, ISAF consists of 49 nations working alongside Afghan national security forces. Denmark and Estonia are the UK’s main operational partners, and Tonga provides support. UK forces also work in close co-ordination with US allies.
In Libya, at the height of Operation Unified Protector, 17 nations—13 NATO and four partners—contributed. These were the US, France, the UK, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Turkey, Greece, Sweden, Romania, Norway, Qatar, the UAE and Jordan.
Lord Lee of Trafford
First of all, I join these Benches in the earlier condolences.
On Monday, our ambassador in Rome hosted a lunch for the Italian air force to thank them for their support in the Libyan operation, which yesterday, at an RAF briefing, the commander of our expeditionary air wing described as absolutely outstanding. Over the years, Parliament has received a number of our service units returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan; last week we had 3 Commando back here. Can we not consider hosting a major reception here and perhaps at No. 10 for representative service personnel from all our allies in the Libyan campaign and, in due course, similarly for Afghanistan, to emphasise the partnership in these campaigns, to acknowledge the sacrifices made and to say thank you?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, my noble friend raises a very good point. The UK is rightly grateful to its coalition allies for the contributions that they have made. But in these times of austerity, this may be difficult. Furthermore, it should be remembered that the UK is only one country within the broad NATO-led coalition of allies that has been operating both in Afghanistan and Libya, so we would more likely look to NATO to conduct such an event.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, the Minister has had the sad duty of reading out the names of nine members of our Armed Forces who have recently lost their lives in the service of our country. On this side, we, too, extend our sincere condolences to their loved ones and friends at this particularly difficult time for them. No words can adequately express the debt that we owe to all who have given their lives on active service.
Will the Minister accept that the Libya campaign illustrated both the strengths and weaknesses of NATO? The strength was NATO’s continuing relevance in a mission that was quick and successful; the weakness was that less than a half of NATO members contributed to the mission. On top of that, there are still issues over the significant number of European nations not meeting NATO expenditure targets on defence. Will the Government use the success of the Libya mission in particular to pursue again this issue of NATO members making an appropriate contribution?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord’s last point. Some allies shared significantly more of the burden in Libya than others and this imbalance needs to be addressed in the future. In practice, we saw a two-tier alliance in terms of operation. Only half of the allies took part militarily, exasperating the limited availability of NATO’s capability.
Lord Stirrup
My Lords, the Minister has reminded us once again of the tragic cost of our ongoing operations and the whole House echoed his sentiments. Does he agree that our most important partner in Afghanistan is Afghanistan itself? And can he say what progress the Afghan national army and police are making towards taking lead responsibility for security throughout their country, at which stage our combat operations can cease?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I can assure the noble and gallant Lord that support for Afghanistan will certainly not end in 2014. It is President Karzai’s aim that by the end of 2014 the Afghans will take lead responsibility for security costs right across the country, and we are on track to meet this aim. The Prime Minister has been clear that we will not have troops in a combat role or in numbers anywhere like current levels by 2015.
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, my noble friend makes a very important point about the reserves of our allied countries. I am afraid I do not have an answer to hand but I will certainly write to him on this and give him a detailed answer.
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, a number of us were dismayed that a relatively simple campaign like the one in Libya could not have been conducted by the European members of NATO but needed American enablers. Will the Prime Minister, when he visits and has his dialogue with France very soon, be raising the issue that there needs to be a slight increase in defence as a percentage of GDP among all the European NATO nations, including ourselves?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, the noble Lord makes a very important point. Having said that, co-operation between the United Kingdom and France, both militarily and at the political level, has been exemplary and contributed significantly in Libya towards developing the level of co-operation and interoperability envisaged in the UK/France defence co-operation treaty that was signed in November 2010.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill
My Lords, I echo the comments of my noble friend Lord Lee, and I hope that the Government will reconsider having a represented reception. We must also remember those who did not return from Afghanistan and Libya. The Minister was very fulsome in telling us all the various nations which have contributed to these conflicts. Will he enumerate the deaths in those two conflicts—those who did not return—and indicate how those unfortunate deaths were split between the various nations which took part?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I have a list here of all the deaths of members of our allied countries. Rather than reading the list out, I will write to my noble friend and I will make sure that a copy of my letter is placed in the Library.
Prisons: HMP Wandsworth
(13 years ago)
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Lord Hurd of Westwell
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they propose to implement the recommendations identified in HM Chief Inspector of Prisons’ report of 10 August 2011 on HM Prison Wandsworth.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, since the inspection was undertaken in February and March, Wandsworth prison has strengthened its management team and improved access to purposeful activity. The issues of showering provision and access to telephones have been tackled and first-night provision is better. In addition, the primary care trust has commissioned a health needs assessment to identify better the requirements of the prison population.
Lord Hurd of Westwell
What were my noble friend’s feelings on first reading this very disappointing report? It details several ways in which Wandsworth prison has fallen backwards since the earlier report and is now holding people in conditions that are unsafe and fall well below the level of human decency. He has listed some things that have happened since the report was published. Can he add to that list and is he satisfied that when those things are carried out, they will solve the problems that the chief inspector reported?
Lord McNally
My Lords, my noble friend asked me what my reaction was. I was appalled. It is a disgraceful and shaming report that lists many failings. I can say only that the National Offender Management Service has reacted to the faults with proper determination. Wandsworth is a very difficult prison. It is one of our Victorian prisons, with over 1,600 prisoners, which puts a great strain on the staff, but there is no doubt that the inspection revealed many weaknesses. All I can assure my noble friend is that the strengthening of the management team signals a determination that the things that were identified will be put right.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, when I was the Chief Inspector of Prisons I also had the problem of inspecting Wandsworth and producing a report very similar to the one that has been mentioned. We introduced a procedure whereby the Prison Service was required to produce an action plan on what it was going to do, which was copied to the Secretary of State and the chief inspector and was then updated after nine months and 18 months. That report listed who was to do what, and by when, to put the recommendations right. The Minister has listed some things that have happened. Can he tell the House whether that action plan procedure is still in force and, if so, whether one has been instigated for HMP Wandsworth?
Lord McNally
I am not quite sure whether the system that the noble Lord refers to is still in action, but I know that Amy Rees, the new governor, has the clear direction to move with all possible speed to implement the action plan. It would be inconceivable if the Secretary of State and Ministers in the Ministry of Justice did not pay the closest attention to making sure that the recommendations made by this report are implemented with all possible speed.
Lord Bach
My Lords, this is obviously a significant and worrying report and I am sure that the House is grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for raising the issue this afternoon. As I understand it, Wandsworth has a larger number of prisoners than any other prison in Europe—some 1,665 at the date of the report. Can the Minister either tell the House today or perhaps write to me telling us how many of those prisoners are doubled up in cells at present? Perhaps I might briefly broaden my question. Can he confirm that capital investment in the Prison Service is generally going down heavily, year on year, and that in fact there will be no capital investment by 2013-14? In the light of the fact that the largest number of prisoners ever is in prison today—the figure on 5 November was 87,749—and in the light of cuts to prison staff, and particularly to probation staff, can he tell the House how the rehabilitation revolution is going?
Lord McNally
We will return to the rehabilitation revolution on 21 November when we discuss the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. I hope that the noble Lord will help me then with the fact that the Ministry of Justice, as part of our deficit reduction programme, has to find £2 billion in cuts. In a department that spends money only on prisons, probation, court services and legal aid, tough decisions have been made. Today it is prison spending cuts that the noble Lord does not like; I suspect that, the next time he gets up, it will be legal aid cuts that he does not like. To govern is to choose, and we have had to make some very tough decisions.
On the question of doubling up, again one of the problems for Wandsworth is that a prison built for just over 1,000 people has 1,600 prisoners. You can work out the number that are doubled up in cells. About the only good thing that I can think of in that circumstance is that they all have in-cell toilet facilities, but even that makes you squirm with horror when you think about sharing a cell containing those facilities.
Lord Dholakia
My Lords, does the Minister share my concern that the policies on diversity and race relations identified in the report have not been adequately addressed? Would he have a word with Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons to ensure that there will be an automatic review of this issue, not only in Wandsworth but in other prisons as well? At the end of the day, is it not right that all inmates should be treated fairly?
Lord McNally
Absolutely, my Lords. One of the reasonable things that came from this report and the prison visitors’ report is that there was no identifiable race problem in the treatment of prisoners. Indeed, 29 per cent of prison officers and staff at Wandsworth are from black and ethnic communities, a figure that I found reassuring, but it is also true that the report said that because of general failures across the board, black and ethnic minority prisoners suffered from those common problems.
On the question of dealing with race relations, I understand that all prisons now have an adviser on such matters, but I will also ensure that my noble friend’s suggestions are drawn to the attention of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector.
Companies: Executive Remuneration
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)
My Lords, the Government believe that executive remuneration which is well structured and rewards long-term success is an important way of promoting sustainability and growth. However, there are justified concerns about the disconnect between how our largest listed companies perform and the rewards that are on offer, particularly at a time of economic restraint. We feel that that is unsustainable. That is why the Government have published a discussion paper that explores these issues and invites views on what can be done.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, does the Minister accept that our top executive pay has gone up by nearly 50 per cent while that of the rest of the population has gone up on average by 2.5 per cent, and that this is deeply offensive to many people who feel that the bankers and others who caused the crisis are now exploiting us? Does the big society not require consent? In the absence of consent, there is a threat to our social cohesion.
Baroness Wilcox
Concern over this is coming not just from Government but from investors, business groups and captains of industry, who have all told us that this is a problem that needs to be addressed. Business should be a force for good but, understandably, figures showing soaring executive pay are causing resentment towards large companies. We want to see transparency, proper accountability to shareholders and a sense of responsibility from British boardrooms.
Lord Renton of Mount Harry
My Lords, would the Minister consider supporting a Bill that would require the chairmen of publicly quoted companies to announce to shareholders regularly, at their annual general meetings, the average wage of the 10 best paid employees, including directors, and the 10 least paid? Might that not bring back some sense of reality?
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, these sorts of suggestions are exactly why the Government have published this discussion paper. By the end of this month, we hope that we will have received all sorts of ideas so that we can come up with some really good suggestions to make for a better balance going forward.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I have experience of corporate boards and was for a number of years the chairman of the remuneration committee of a major multinational, Vinci. Is it not the case that the present position on top executive pay is highly unsatisfactory, utterly unedifying and a threat to the good reputation of our market economy? Most sensible people would totally exclude either statutory regulation of pay or penal taxation as a solution, but simply making speeches, publishing discussion papers or trying to use moral suasion with institutional investors does not seem to get anywhere at all. In that context, may I put two specific practical suggestions to the Minister? One is that we place a statutory duty on public companies to publish the criteria and rationale for their decisions on top executive pay. The second is to adopt the French practice of having two elected representatives of the employees as a whole on the board of every publicly quoted company. Additionally, at least one of those representatives should be on the remuneration committee.
Baroness Wilcox
I am interested to hear the noble Lord’s tales of being on a FTSE 100 board. I, too, have been on a FTSE 100 board, so like him I have also served on a committee. We all know that there are problems and that things are not right. The question is how we put it right without damaging Britain’s competitiveness. Those 100 top companies employ so many people and it is very important that we get this balance right. As to his suggestion of worker representatives on company boards in the United Kingdom, we will of course look at this, in the same way that we will look at everything else in the consultation. We would be only too delighted if the noble Lord writes in and makes sure that his views are known on the record.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, have the Government considered the evidence that the greater the inequality in remuneration, salaries and wages in a society, the greater there tends to be a great underclass in that society, which the prison population amply demonstrates? Any addressing of the issue has to take that into account.
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, the Prime Minister himself has expressed concern about this growing divide. He feels that it is wrong for our country and does not make for a happy country. It is so important that we look again at encouraging the very big companies to make sure that there is transparency, accountability and responsibility in boardrooms today.
Privileges and Conduct Committee: Eighth Report
The Chairman of Committees
That the report from the Select Committee on the Conduct of Lord Taylor of Warwick (8th Report, HL Paper 210) be agreed to.
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara)
My Lords, in speaking to this Motion, with the leave of the House I shall also speak to the three following Motions on the Order Paper. Noble Lords will be only too well aware of the background to this report and the accompanying ninth report on the conduct of the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield. Both noble Lords were tried earlier this year for crimes under the Theft Act 1968; both were convicted and subsequently sentenced to prison terms. The offences of which they were found guilty involved false claims for expenses under the Members’ reimbursement scheme. The noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Hanningfield, were guilty of serious offences which have damaged the reputation of the House. They have been heavily punished and have now acknowledged their guilt and apologised to the House.
The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Warwick, has repaid in full the sum he owed the House. Although the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, has not yet been able to repay the money he owes the House, he has undertaken to do so as soon as he can, possibly before the end of the year and at all events before he returns to the House following his suspension. The Select Committee and its sub-committee were clear that neither noble Lord should be eligible to return to the House until the sentences imposed by the court—12 months in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and nine months in that of the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield—had run their course. Therefore, we have recommended in each case that the period of suspension should begin on the date of sentence and run for its full length.
I do not believe that I need to say more. The House has now replaced the Members’ reimbursement scheme with a simpler and more transparent scheme of allowances, which is far less open to abuse. We devoutly hope that the cases before the House today will be the last of their type arising from the expenses scandal of 2009.
Baroness Prosser
My Lords, I rise briefly to put the record straight regarding some remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, in his evidence to the Commissioner for Standards. On page 16 of the report on the noble Lord, he is quoted as saying:
“Lord Prosser paid back £20,000 or something”.
I want to make it absolutely clear that this remark does not refer to me and that at no stage have I been found to have wrongly claimed sums under the Members’ reimbursement scheme.
The Chairman of Committees
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, for her clarification, of which I was given advance notice. I fully endorse what she has said.
Lord Dobbs
My Lords, I take to my feet with huge regret, a very heavy heart and considerable trepidation as one of the newer Members of your Lordships’ House. However, I feel I must intervene to express my dismay that this House does not have the power to take more robust action in this matter.
I campaigned for the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Warwick, in his attempts to be elected as a Member of Parliament. I bear him absolutely no personal ill will; indeed, personally, I wish him well. However, I suspect that I am not alone in being horrified by his lengthy interview in this morning’s newspapers, in which he declares his resolve to resume his place in this House on the basis that his experience in prison will make his input even more valuable. This House does not exist to provide a means of rehabilitation. We are here as individuals to serve a greater purpose. We are here not to serve ourselves but to serve others. The reputation of this House is of far greater importance than the interests of any one Member.
If the noble Lords, Lord Taylor of Warwick and Lord Hanningfield, were to return to this House, and perhaps claim further expenses, the damage done to the reputation of the House would be immense. The public would not understand; neither would they forgive. The media would mock. The reputation of this House and of every single one of us would be tarnished. We would be made out to be all the things that we are not—self-serving, mercenary and hopelessly out of touch. At a time when we are asking our young men and women in the Armed Forces to risk—and all too often to give—their lives, it would seem shameless.
We are currently in the process of debating the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, which would give this House powers to expel Members permanently. However, it is not the law—not yet, at least. In the mean time, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, has challenged us with his very public, very lengthy and, in my view, desperately unwise interview. This forces me, sadly and with a desperately heavy heart, to make publicly these points which might have been better made more privately. That would have been my preference but this is now all too public an issue.
The noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Hanningfield, have broken the law of this land, for which they are being punished. They have also broken the rules of this House, for which we are about to punish them. However, our powers are limited. We can do no more than formally suspend them for a while. This is all that we can do and I do not believe that it is enough.
I therefore ask the Chairman of Committees if, in addition to moving the Motions on the Order Paper, he will take measures to take the mood of this House, and that he, or a more appropriate official of this House, remind the noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Hanningfield, by letter, that the interests and reputation of the House are supreme and override the interests of any one Member; and further ask them, in the wider interests of this House, not to resume their places here.
The Chairman of Committees
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, for his remarks. As he has said, and as noble Lords well know, the powers of this House to suspend Members are limited. The noble Lord suggests that I or someone else write a letter to the noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Hanningfield. I will take back that suggestion to the Privileges and Conduct Committee, but I cannot respond now as to what that committee might decide.
Privileges and Conduct Committee: Eighth Report
The Chairman of Committees
To resolve that Lord Taylor of Warwick be suspended from the service of the House for 12 months, with effect from 31 May 2011.
Privileges and Conduct Committee: Ninth Report
The Chairman of Committees
That the report from the Select Committee on the Conduct of Lord Hanningfield (9th Report, HL Paper 211) be agreed to.
Privileges and Conduct Committee: Ninth Report
The Chairman of Committees
To resolve that Lord Hanningfield be suspended from the service of the House for nine months, with effect from 1 July 2011.
Privileges and Conduct Committee: 10th Report
The Chairman of Committees
That the report from the Select Committee on the Guide to the Code of Conduct (10th Report, HL Paper 212) be agreed to.
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara)
My Lords, I hope that this report is self-explanatory. Under the Code of Conduct, the Sub-Committee on Lords’ Conduct is required to keep the Guide to the Code of Conduct under regular review. It has done so and has recommended to the Select Committee a number of changes to the guide. We endorse the sub-committee’s proposals and, in turn, recommend them to the House. If the House agrees the report, I understand that the amended guide will be reprinted in the near future. I beg to move.
Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill
(13 years ago)
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Baroness Stowell of Beeston
That the amendments for the Report stage be marshalled and considered in the following order:
Clauses 1 and 2, Schedule 1, Clauses 3 to 7, Schedule 2, Clauses 8 to 15, Schedule 3, Clauses 16 to 18, Schedule 4, Clauses 19 to 24, Schedule 5, Clause 25, Schedule 6, Clauses 26 to 29, Schedules 7 and 8, Clauses 30 and 31.
Health and Social Care Bill
(13 years ago)
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Lord Warner
Lord Warner
My Lords, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, I should like to speak to Amendment 37 as my name has been added to it.
Before getting down to the precise wording of the amendment, I want to give some context to my remarks by talking about what I regard as the total incoherence of Clause 4. I note from the letter of 7 November from the noble Earl, Lord Howe, to my noble friend Lady Thornton that the Government now seem to want to treat Clause 4 in the same way as Clause 1. I have to say that that is hardly a ringing endorsement of the drafting of Clause 4. I wonder, privately, how many other clauses we will have this problem with as we progress through the Bill. In effect, the Government are seeking to take these clauses out of the normal consideration of a Bill in Committee. We are getting into rather strange territory where, as we wander through the Bill, we find that, when the Government find themselves under pressure with regard to bits of the Bill, they sweep those bits aside to have another go in some procedure, which is less than clear to the House, and promise to come back later. Before I go any further on the amendment, as I am already unclear as to how the Government are going to handle Clause 1—and, it now seems, Clause 4—procedurally, I would welcome any light that the Minister can shed on how we are going to deal with these clauses and have a proper discussion of them in Committee.
I turn now to Amendment 37. I am completely supportive of reducing or even stopping ministerial and Department of Health micromanagement of the NHS.
Lord Mawhinney
I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord. Is he aware that the concern which he has just expressed is held by other noble Lords as well?
Lord Warner
I am grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention. The more the merrier, I say, on this theme and I hope that noble Lords will speak out about this issue in our debate today.
As I was saying, I am completely supportive of reducing or stopping ministerial and Department of Health micromanagement of the NHS, which, as I understand it, is the Government’s purpose in framing Clause 4. However, I struggle with reconciling the clause in its present form with the other duties and powers that the Secretary of State has taken unto himself in the Bill. I do not mean just the relationship between Clauses 1 and 4, which itself seems to have produced a hefty dose of confusion and uncertainty, not to mention, in the case of Clause 1, many attempts at drafting alternatives. How will Clause 4, for example, fit with Clause 3, which most of us in the previous session in Committee—except, perhaps the Minister—seemed to favour strengthening in terms of the duty on inequalities? How will it fit with Clauses 16 and 17, with their very extensive regulation-making powers for the Secretary of State, or indeed Clause 18 or Clause 20, which gives the Secretary of State extensive mandating powers, which seem to me to be rather stronger than the new chairman of the NHS Commissioning Board seems to think?
Many people who have looked at the Bill do not understand what the Secretary of State is trying to do in relation to the issue of central control, central powers and autonomy and delegation. Is he trying to let go or to tighten his grip? I do not see, at present, how the Government can retain in the Bill a clause as loosely drafted as Clause 4 and, at the same time, retain all the other powers of the Secretary of State that we will be discussing later. Apart from anything else, this is a recipe for confusion in the minds of many local decision-makers.
Are people to take Clause 4 as drafted at face value? If they do, will they not be wondering whether the Secretary of State or his henchmen and henchwomen in the Department of Health or the NHS Commissioning Board will come down on them like a ton of bricks using other powers in the Bill if they think that they are not acting in the interests of the NHS? What will the courts make of all this? If people do not like a decision taken higher up the line, as the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust is demonstrating now over paediatric surgery changes, do they seek judicial review of the central decisions, praying in aid Clause 4 as drafted? Will not Clause 4 in its present form simply encourage legal challenge and create local uncertainty?
I turn to the wording of the clause and why Amendment 37 is at least an improvement. It is an attempt to improve what is a highly defective clause. As I read Clause 4, it seems to place little inhibition on local decision-makers,
“exercising functions … or providing services”,
in any manner that they consider appropriate. If that means what it says in the dictionary, if people want, for example, to provide a wide range of alternative therapies for which there is no scientific evidence of clinical benefit, they can do so, praying in aid the powers under Clause 4. If they want to remove tattoos or do a bit of cosmetic surgery, I cannot see that there is very much to stop them. Under the clause as drafted, the Secretary of State can intervene only after the event. If he finds out what has been going on, he can, in effect, try to stop it happening again, but that is ex post facto. He cannot intervene earlier, as I understand the drafting of the clause. I am happy to be corrected by the noble Earl, but I am not the only one who thinks that these powers will have that effect.
Amendment 37 is an attempt to require those behaving autonomously locally to apply the test that their actions are in the interests of the NHS before they take their decisions rather than relying on the Secretary of State deciding that they were not in the interests of the NHS after the event. I see that my colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, is now with us. I suspect that we both agree that it is a far from perfect solution, but it is better than the way that the clause is currently drafted. I know that some noble Lords are very attached to the clause—like me, they are attached to the idea of autonomy—but I hope that they will consider whether in its present form it is really in the best interests of the NHS. I suggest that the Government rethink the form of Clause 4 if they want to proceed with it. As I see it, what would get nearer to their intentions but not create some of the loopholes that I have identified is a kind of drafting that gives a commitment that the Secretary of State would not exceed the powers provided elsewhere in the Bill, would impose only burdens that are totally consistent with those powers and would maximise operational freedoms for those delivering NHS services consistent with public accountability. That seems to me to be the direction in which the Government are trying to go, but the way the clause is drafted does not do that.
I would prefer the Minister to accept that the clause is seriously deficient and either abandon it altogether or take it away for a serious makeover. In the mean time, on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and myself, I move Amendment 37, which goes a modest way to improve the shape and drafting of the clause. I beg to move.
Lord Patel
My Lords, first, I offer my sincere apologies to the House for being delayed. I was also thrown by the fact that that the first two amendments were not moved. I am sorry about that. I am grateful to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for moving the amendment in my absence, and I join absolutely in his comments. I shall try to cover some other points. My name is also on the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and I support that too.
As I interpret it, under the clause, as long as the Secretary of State does not think that it is inconsistent with the interests of the NHS, he or she must act positively to allow any other person exercising health service functions to do so in a way that that person thinks appropriate. Although the Secretary of State keeps some form of oversight, it is the views of other persons and bodies delivering health services on how those services are to be delivered that are important.
This duty would therefore require the Secretary of State, when considering whether to place requirements on the NHS, to make a judgment. The challenge for the Secretary of State would be to justify why these requirements were necessary. Does this mean that the Secretary of State has the power to act only when the steps to be taken are really needed or essential, rather than because he or she thinks that something is desirable or appropriate? He or she would have to demonstrate why no other course of action will be followed. Is that a high test to meet on the part of the Secretary of State?
Baroness Cumberlege
My Lords, I very strongly support the spirit of Clause 4, and I oppose the amendment that the clause should no longer stand part of the Bill. I accept that it could be amended and could be clearer, but I want to hold to its spirit.
In the past I have put down six amendments to two major health Bills in an attempt to achieve something similar to what is in Clause 4. I have to say that my attempts, although I was supported by the King’s Fund, were puny compared with the weight of this mighty Bill. I hoped that my time had almost come. I say almost, because I know that the Minister, in his letter dated 7 November to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, which the noble Lord, Lord Warner, mentioned, is suggesting a strategy. I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, does not like this strategy. In contrast, I do. One of the real hallmarks of this House is that we try to negotiate and accommodate what we, as a whole in this House, feel is appropriate.
In revising and amending the Bill, I appreciate that an enormous amount of time and care—
Lord Warner
I am not opposed to having a strategy, if I may say so to the noble Baroness, and I thank her for giving way. However, when a Bill reaches this House with a major clause in it, it has been through the other place and has been subject to a lot of scrutiny by Professor Field and his group, the Future Forum, it is reasonable to assume that the drafting does not have the kind of loopholes that this clause has. I am not the only one raising this; other people are raising the same issue. There is a lot of concern outside. We are not opposed to having a strategy, but it is reasonable to expect the Government to have got the Bill into a better shape than it was in before it came here.
Baroness Cumberlege
My Lords, I thought that that was the whole purpose of Committee stage. This stage is intended to question some of these concerns and to see whether a resolution can be achieved.
Lord Warner
The noble Earl is taking this clause out of the Committee stage, so far as I understand his proposal. If the strategy is to take clauses out when the going gets rough, that does not seem to be in keeping with the spirit and behaviour of this House.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I have no desire to take this clause out of the Committee proceedings. These proceedings are continuing. We have heard the noble Lord and his views, and I look forward to hearing other noble Lords. I am not in the least desirous of inhibiting debate on this clause, which I think is very valuable. However, perhaps noble Lords will consider that, in view of the undertaking that I gave on 2 November, there is a certain amount that need not be said today because I have undertaken to look at this clause on a cross-party basis and with an open mind. It is a clause that the Government were and are satisfied with and they believe that it can stand as worded without amendment. However, I appear to be accused of being too concessionary on this. It is a case of the Government being damned if we do one thing and damned if we do the opposite.
I felt that my offer to the Committee was helpful. I think that there is concern around the Chamber about this matter and I can only repeat my offer to look at that concern and, if we can reach an agreement, to put beyond doubt the fact that these clauses do what I believe many noble Lords wish them to do. I hope that in that spirit the noble Lord, Lord Warner, will agree that, while we can debate the clause today for as long as we wish, the offer is there on the table from the Government to engage in cross-party discussions with a view to reaching consensus.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, if the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, will allow a moment’s interruption to her speech, I promise to give way. It is very important to state that a number of us who have tabled amendments to this clause, including those of us who have expressed a desire for it to be omitted, did indeed inquire whether it might not be wise to try to discover more about the precise meaning of the clause. There are some arguments among lawyers about its effect and about whether it should be taken together with Clauses 1 and 10, to which it is clearly very intimately related—a point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, in her role as chairman of the Constitution Committee. Therefore, we must stand accused of having asked the noble Earl, Lord Howe, whether he would be willing to consider taking this group together, not forgetting the long debate that we had on Clause 1, in order to find out whether there is common ground about their precise meaning, their weight and their relationship with one another. The matter will then of course come back to the Committee for wider consideration.
I hope that the Committee will recognise that, with such a difficult balance of legal opinion, it may be sensible to discuss the issue further before bringing it back to the Chamber for the continuation of the Committee stage. In fact, what I thought the noble Lord, Lord Warner, was most eloquently asking for was that the clause be taken away for reconsideration. He went on to say that that might be a good way to deal with the matter. We are in total accord with the view of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and I therefore ask him to allow us to continue with that reconsideration.
Baroness Cumberlege
I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who has put the matter eloquently and correctly. I am very much in favour of my noble friend’s wish to try to get some negotiation. As the noble Baroness said, many of us feel that that is the way forward.
This is a difficult issue. It is trying to get the balance right between, on the one hand, the accountability and responsibilities of the Secretary of State, and, on the other, the freedom of those managing the service to do so without interference. Many of us are trying to achieve that balance.
I should like to refer to the letter that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, mentioned because I want to get it into Hansard. My noble friend urges us to consider three key factors in his letter and I quote the second one. He said that,
“we fulfil the policy intention that the Secretary of State should not be involved in the day to day operations of the NHS. Ministers should set the overall strategy, hold national arms-length bodies rigorously to account for their performance, and have the requisite power to intervene if the system is not operating effectively”.
Those are my views entirely.
I am now going to say something that I know is extremely unpopular in the Palace of Westminster: politicians are really neither loved nor trusted by the public to a great extent and I have to say also that they are seldom admired by those working in the NHS. There have been too many decisions that have been taken without any evidence to support them, resulting in very long delays in things such as reconfigurations. Those delays have jeopardised patient care. Reversals have been made at the last minute, ignoring well founded clinical advice from clinicians saying to us that the service is unsafe, yet the position of an inadequate, unsafe hospital or service continues because of political interference. That undermines the confidence of managers to manage.
I want to mention Kevin Barron, who is the Labour MP for Rother Valley—
Baroness Thornton
I do apologise to the noble Baroness, but I absolutely cannot resist asking her whether she thinks that the public love quangos more or less than politicians, since the intention is to put our National Health Service in the hands of an extremely large quango. So is it Andrew Lansley or David Nicholson?
Baroness Cumberlege
My Lords, I have not seen any evidence from MORI or any other polling organisation that has put that question to the public, so it is left in the air. I have seen the MORI poll that very recently showed that 88 per cent of people who were questioned said that doctors were the most trusted profession to tell the truth, whereas only 14 per cent thought that the truth was told by politicians. I think that is really sad—sad for democracy and sad when it comes to trying to build the confidence of people who are in charge of the National Health Service.
One real problem, which exists even if the same party is in power for a length of time, is a lack of a consistency of leadership. The Secretaries of State are here one minute and gone the next. Really successful organisations—I am thinking of schools, hospitals, companies—benefit from continuity in leadership. I read the other day that Sir Alex Ferguson has been in charge of Manchester United for 25 years. If we had had that inspiring leadership for a real length of time, I wonder what difference it might have made to the NHS. Since 1997 we have had seven Secretaries of State. Frank Dobson was in charge for 17 months. Alan Milburn, the longest serving Secretary of State, served for four and a half years and some might think that he was the most successful. At least he had time to draw up the NHS Plan, which made an impact on the service and he had time partially to implement it. John Reid—now the noble Lord, Lord Reid—Patricia Hewitt and Alan Johnson all served two years, and Andy Burnham less than a year.
Those of us who have served in government know, as Ministers, that you take up your post with enormous enthusiasm and unrealistic aspirations. You want to do things. Above all, you want to improve the NHS. You believe that you are in charge and that you can set policy. But, no, the first thing that happens is that you inherit the policies of your predecessor, which are not your policies that you know and love. They are not yours, but you do your very best to implement them. Then you have a chance to set your own policy but, before you have had time to implement it, you are off again. In the mean time, you are expected to make some very courageous, unpopular decisions about institutions that you may know very little about and about people whom you have rarely met. So how do you exercise judgment and build relationships when you are there for such a very short time, possibly just two years? That contributes to an NHS that gets confused and fed up and is mistrustful of its masters.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, the first thing I want to say in the light of the Minister’s comments a moment ago is that of course I read his letter dated 7 November to my noble friend Lady Thornton, which was copied to a number of us. I think the Minister deserves considerable credit for it. I have no doubt at all that the letter was written in total good faith and was totally sincere. The Minister is trying to see if a compromise is possible: whether there is something that would be an improvement both to the existing text of the Bill and to the various amendments that have been put down. It is a creditable initiative on his part. I have tried in the past as a Minister myself to do things in that direction and I do not think the Minister should be penalised for that in any way.
Equally, as he said himself, the Minister does not want to inhibit the freedom of debate in any way this afternoon. It is very important that we express our views, because they can be taken into account when those informal consultations subsequently take place. If in fact his aim can be achieved and we can get something that we can all agree to, everybody should be happy. That is because we will be content that the Bill will be improved and the Government will find that they have a much easier ride on Report and Third Reading. If there is an agreed solution to this and other problems, I trust that the whole thing will go through Report and Third Reading like a dose of salts. Everybody could be satisfied with that outcome.
This group of amendments includes a clause stand part debate, and this clause raises two very important issues. First, I do not think that micromanagement is ever a good idea. You cannot run a business on that basis; when running a business you must appoint the best people you can find and let them get on with the job. It is exactly the same thing in respect of the armed services. Micromanagement is always a mistake in running or managing any human institution. That pretty much goes without saying.
The problem is that good management sometimes needs the ability to intervene very rapidly in a crisis, when things are going wrong. You cannot allow yourself—if you are going to have a well managed organisation—to be inhibited by bureaucratic procedures or rules from taking the necessary action to make sure that things are set right on the front line. That is probably more important for the NHS than any other human institution I can think of, because, literally, the activities of the NHS are a matter of life and death. Of course, that happens to be true of the armed services as well, but there are not many institutions of which that is true. The general principle is there.
My first point is that many of us are worried that, if the Bill is passed, there will be insufficient ability by the Secretary of State to take that necessary action, perhaps very dramatically, in a crisis. That is a matter of deep concern. There is of course—and I hope I do not offend either the noble Earl or others on the other side of the House by saying this; they know this perfectly well—a real concern out there in the public that the reason why the Bill has been drafted this way and why the Secretary of State’s powers have appeared to have been, or some people feel they are being, emasculated, and the reason why autonomy is being emphasised, is that the Government think there is going to be a crisis in the NHS. The Government are not going to be funding the NHS at the same rate as the last Government did.
I accept that a lot of the money that we spent was not spent with enormously good value and probably too much was spent on paying more for inputs—perhaps excessive pay rises—rather than buying new outputs. A lot was spent on bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the bulk of it was spent immensely usefully. It was an incredible achievement to get maximum waiting times down from 18 months to 18 weeks. There is a general feeling out there that that progress is not going to be sustained and that this Government are not going to be committed to funding the NHS in the same way. They are trying to make savings of £15 billion to £20 billion, we hear. There is going to be a crisis and some nasty news coming through; hospitals are going to be closed and so forth. At that point, the Secretary of State is going to be able to turn round, because of the effect of this Bill if it becomes an Act, and say, “Don’t talk to me—it’s not my responsibility. Go and talk to the national Commissioning Board or your local clinical commissioning group. Go and talk to anybody. Don’t talk to me”.
We have that already. I am a total supporter of the independence of the Bank of England. I refused to vote with my then party, the Tory party, when it opposed that independence. However, an inevitable consequence of making the Bank of England independent is that when we have questions here on monetary matters, the Minister who is responding—quite normally and naturally—says, “Don’t talk to me about it, go and talk to the governor or the Monetary Policy Committee. Don’t talk to me”. We do not want that situation to arise in relation to the NHS. That is the issue raised by this particular clause.
Secondly, I do not think that micromanagement or political management is actually the real problem in the NHS. I am sure there has been unfortunate political intervention and interference over the history of the NHS, and there is no doubt that is the case, but that is not the real problem. The actual, fatal tendency of the NHS—the besetting sin, if I can use a theological concept—is something quite different. Its fatal tendency is bureaucratic or producer capture: the tendency of any organisation that is in a monopolistic position to be run for the convenience and in the interests of those who are providing the service, whether doctors, nurses, managers or whatever. That is the problem we should really be addressing.
However, I am awfully afraid that the way this clause is drafted at present, far from acting as a barrier or corrective to that unfortunate tendency, may actually reinforce it. The text we have before us says that any person,
“exercising functions in relation to the health service”—
must be,
“free to exercise those functions or provide those services in the manner that it considers most appropriate”.
That seems almost an invitation to bureaucratic or producer capture.
I am not actually sure, with great respect to my noble friend Lord Warner—whose knowledge in this area I greatly admire—that his amendment fully addresses that. The amendment says,
“leave out ‘manner that it considers most appropriate’ and insert ‘interests of the health service’”.
That is a little ambiguous—the interests of the health service could indeed be what I define as the producer interest of the health service. I would much rather that it said “in the interests of the patient”, or “according to the principles of the NHS”. That would be clearer and would address the point that I am making.
Something needs to be done to redress the balance against this fatal tendency for the NHS to be run in the interests of producers, where the patient simply sits in line and then is grateful for what he or she receives. That is a culture we want to oppose and against which we must introduce long-term, structural, corrective mechanisms. That is a vital task for anybody framing a Bill to manage the future of the NHS.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, as my noble friend the Minister points out, the autonomy clauses are to form part of the Government’s discussions with other noble Lords about the Secretary of State’s duties. These clauses are of considerable significance. In my judgment, Clause 4, relating to the Secretary of State’s duty, and the new Section 13F, relating to the Commissioning Board, threaten the Secretary of State’s primary duty to secure provision of services, however that is ultimately worded after discussions are concluded.
In principle, promoting autonomy is to be welcomed; so is avoiding micromanagement within the NHS, as my noble friend Lady Cumberlege so eloquently pointed out in her speech. One of the best features of this Bill is that it establishes a well-defined decentralised structure in which decisions about arranging and commissioning services are made at a local level in accordance with local needs and conditions. However, as the Government have recognised, it is also essential that final responsibility, both for the quality of the health service and for the very large sums of taxpayers' money spent in providing it, should rest with the Secretary of State, and that he or she should be accountable not only to Parliament for the exercise of that responsibility but answerable in the courts for failure to exercise it in accordance with the law.
I will say a few words now about how the difficulty arises in drafting provisions that strike the right balance between decentralisation and the Secretary of State’s ultimate responsibility. As we all know, under Section 1(2) of the National Health Act 2006, the Secretary of State had a primary duty to,
“provide or secure the provision of services”.
That was underpinned by a direct duty under Section 3 to provide a list of specific services such as hospital accommodation. That duty was in turn supplemented and buttressed by powers under Sections 7 and 8 to delegate and give directions to other NHS bodies. So there was under the 2006 legislation a simple linear structure down from the Secretary of State. Under the Bill, the position is more complex, because under Clause 10 the Section 3 duty to provide the specific services is devolved to the clinical commissioning groups, and the general powers to delegate and give directions are removed. That is why it is challenging to provide for an overarching duty on the Secretary of State to secure the provision of services under Clause 1, and to provide for the exercise of all his other functions to that end. It is that challenge that is principally to be the subject of discussions.
If the Secretary of State is bound by a duty to promote autonomy, as proposed in Clause 4, the force of his duty to secure provision of services is weakened, because his failure to intervene in any given case would be very difficult to challenge on judicial review, except in an extreme case. Generally, the Secretary of State could respond to any challenge regarding a failure to act on his part by claiming in his defence that he was declining to act pursuant to his duty to promote autonomy. It does not help that the Secretary of State would only be bound to promote autonomy,
“so far as is consistent with the interests of the health service”,
in the context of any such challenge. That is because the arbiter of what those interests were would be the Secretary of State himself. A court would not substitute its own view of the interests of the health service for his unless it was satisfied that his view was irrational; and that is too high a bar. It follows, in my view, that there is an inconsistency between the proposed duties to promote autonomy and fulfilment of the Secretary of State's overall responsibility, however it is to be expressed.
The problem with proposed new Section 13F is that it is proposed that the board, with regard to its autonomy provision, be similarly bound to promote the autonomy of the commissioning bodies and others. So the board can argue that it should decline to intervene with the commissioning bodies in accordance with its duty to promote autonomy. That could be relevant if the board were challenged by judicial review on its failure to exercise its intervention powers or, alternatively, relevant if the Secretary of State wished to exercise his powers in respect of the board on the board's failure to intervene where the Secretary of State thought that the board ought to intervene. Thus, while it is desirable— and I entirely agree that it is—for the chain of responsibility to allow plenty of slack as a general rule, when the chain needs to be tightened in the event of failure or threatened failure, the danger is that the chain will be found to be weak in two important links.
I look forward to the discussions to be held with my noble friend the Minister and pay tribute to his and his department’s willingness to hold those discussions on a cross-party basis. I hope that we will see some way as to how this conundrum may be resolved, to retain a strong legal chain of responsibility without encouraging or permitting micromanagement of the bodies in the NHS, to which powers are rightly to be devolved. If we find a solution, that in itself will do a great deal to assist in the confidence that my noble friend Lady Cumberlege rightly points out is lacking among the public and the NHS in the political process.
I add only this. In my view, these two clauses could simply be deleted without doing any violence to the purposes of the Bill. That is because the principles of decentralisation and autonomy and the avoidance of micromanagement are defined and limited by the Secretary of State’s powers woven into the very structure of the Bill and into the way in which the bodies relate to each other under the provisions of the Bill. I suggest that these clauses merely serve to muddy the waters.
Lord Mawhinney
I noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, pointed to me when he talked about making a theological point about a besetting sin. Because I was going to compliment him and say how pleased I was that he did so, I will happily share that endorsement with the right reverend Prelate.
The noble Lord also made an extremely important point, and around that point I want to speak for a few minutes, with the House’s indulgence. His second point was right; the problem with the health service is bureaucracy—it is not anti-liberation or shackles, but systems and procedures and a pressure coming from all sides that nobody should rock the boat. I listened to my noble friend Lady Cumberlege, and I shall come back in more detail in a moment on what she said, but I suspect that I cannot be the only one in this House to think that, for every case where outsiders did not like some political intervention, outsiders, including patients, did not like the lack of intervention from inside the health service.
On the whole, my experience of over 30 years at both ends of this Corridor has not been that patients come to me and say that the problem with the health service is the politicians. They more frequently say that the problem with the health service is the management or, as we discussed the other day, the doctors who will not admit when they have got something wrong, or the nurses who simply do not provide even the most basic care for the elderly in today’s health service. So the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, did us a favour when he pointed out that bureaucratic point.
I remain extremely grateful to the Minister for the willingness that he expressed the other day to take away Clauses 1 and 4. Those in the House for that debate will know that it was a widely held view across all the Chamber—and the Minister not only agreed to do it but did it with a tone and spirit that was widely admired. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, for her contribution in support of that. I would not want anything that I or others say to make my noble friend feel as though the House was reneging on the request made to him to take Clauses 1 and 4 away, which he showed a willingness to do. My contribution to this particular debate is to suggest a few of the things that he might like to think about when he does so which may need to be clarified, resolved or excised, so that when we get back to this on Report he will have a much smoother run—one which I and I suspect other noble Lords hope that he will be able to enjoy.
When the noble Lord, Lord Warner, made his comments, I intervened to say that he is not the only one in the House who thought what he thought. I was referring to a very pertinent phrase which he used. He said that he was not clear whether the purpose of Clause 4 was for the Secretary of State to be engaging or disengaging. I think that is part of the problem of the drafting of this clause. Those of us with some knowledge of the health service are still unclear whether this is meant to help the Secretary of State engage or disengage.
That takes me to my noble friend Lady Cumberlege. She and I served happily together in the department. We conspired for the common good on many an occasion, both in public and over a cup of coffee in our offices. She knows it to be true that there are few people in the health service who I hold in higher regard for a lifetime of work. But I am going to add a “but”. On this occasion, while I admired the tenacious adherence to what she read as the spirit of this clause, most of the rest of what she said left me wondering exactly where she was trying to go. Nobody is claiming that democracy is a clean and simple process. It can be messy. Part of my noble friend’s argument was that Ministers were not to be trusted and that it would be much better to hand it over to the professionals. I respect my noble friend for that view but I do not think it carries a lot of weight. I, too, read the NHS Confederation’s paper. In fact, I have it with me. Every time I read what it said on Clause 4, I thought to myself, “There is just the chance, Brian, that you are giving these people more credit than they deserve”. Perhaps this is a politically incorrect thing to say, but I was reminded just a smidgen of Mandy Rice–Davies in the sense of, “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”.
The problem with this debate is that you have the masses of the health service with their procedures and bureaucracy intermingled with outstanding professionals who, I know from my experience, feel as frustrated with their colleagues as sometimes Ministers feel with the bureaucrats. On the other hand, you have this messy democratic process that occasionally shifts Ministers. Listening to my noble friend, you would be amazed by the claim that the NHS is the envy of the world. I think it is only the envy of the world in certain aspects and that there are other aspects where the world thinks it can do a better job than the NHS. The health service is right up there competitively but given the history of the past 40 years, in which Ministers have played a leading role, it is hard to envisage the outcome that my noble friend talked about. Therefore, I have to say to her that I had a real problem with what she was trying to convey to the Committee. If you do not have democracy, you do not have any public accountability.
Baroness Cumberlege
Does my noble friend agree, however, that when I was putting forward the case, I said that we would not negate democracy but that this was a method whereby we could give the Secretary of State more discretion when he wished to interfere—or, rather, not to interfere but to let local people run the service? As a manager, I know that if you are going to achieve things you have to win the hearts as well as the minds of the people who are running the service. I sense that my noble friend is trying to ensure that I will be isolated in these arguments. When I proposed this, I said to your Lordships that I knew that the line I was taking would be unpopular in the Palace of Westminster. Of course it is, because the House is full of politicians. However, I would like to explain to my noble friend that it is not just my view.
Kevin Barron, the Labour MP for Rother Valley, who is a previous chairman of the Health Select Committee, told his colleagues—this was at the Labour Party conference, which understandably I was not at but I read the report—that he recalled looking at statistics for the east of England, some years ago, which were worse than for the rest of the country. The region had retained more local units, which corresponded with marginal constituencies and he said that it was his belief that health experts’ advice, rather than party politics, should determine how and where facilities were provided.
In addition, Paul Corrigan, adviser to No. 10 when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, said that “the public want accountability”—we agree with that—“but are not very keen on the fact that the responsibility lies with elected politicians, who they do not altogether trust”. I serve on a lot of committees, have been on a lot of platforms and have talked to a lot of people over the years in the National Health Service. The question that is often put to me is, “Can you not depoliticise the NHS?”, because it is seen as a very real problem. I accept that we cannot, with this democratic process that we are in, but, as I was saying, there is a balance to be struck. At the moment, unless we have something similar to Clause 4, I cannot see that balance being achieved.
Lord Mawhinney
I am grateful to my noble friend. The answer to her question is no. No, I was not trying to isolate or misrepresent her and no, you cannot run a publicly accountable health service without politicians—and without politicians being in charge. In her first speech, my noble friend prayed in aid the tendency of politicians to micromanage. There is one noble Lord in this House—who I will not name, for reasons that will become obvious very soon—who came to me when I was party chairman. He wanted to micromanage politically the hospital in his constituency. He was shown the door pretty quickly by me, precisely because that is not the sort of micromanagement that even politicians want to buy into, much less the medical profession, the nursing profession and all those who work in the health service. That is not micromanagement; that is pure political interference for self-interest.
I am not at all clear what micromanagement really is. Occasionally, as my noble friend pointed out, decisions are so difficult and tricky that they take quite a lot of time. I invite her to cast her mind back to those heady days when we shared Richmond House.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Davies, was right to refer to besetting sins behind me.
Lord Mawhinney
Moving on, I remind my noble friend of the times we sat with a cup of coffee and a private secretary or two—just to make her feel better—and we wrestled over some fairly difficult and complex issues. Either she or I would say, “We need a bit more information about that”, the civil servant would say, “Yes, Minister”, and in due course, when diaries permitted, we would sit down again with a bit more information. That can be said to be good ministerial governance—or it could be said to be politically motivated delay when others in the health service knew better, and if only we had got out of the way they would have done what they wanted, but they would do what those in power at the time happened to want, ignoring the contrary views of those who did not happen to hold the management positions at that moment.
I want my noble friend to accept that I still hold her in as high regard as I did before this debate started, but we part company fairly fundamentally on the issue of the accountability on a spend of £128 billion a year. As I said in an earlier debate—I have expressed this privately to the Minister, and my noble friend had the grace to say that he understood—my difficulty is that if you are spending £128 billion of public money, the public whose money are spending are simply not going to say when big problems arise, “Well, that’s okay, we’ll listen to him or her because he or she is chairman of a quango”—even a quango as highly thought of as my noble friend no doubt hopes the national Commissioning Board will be.
There is no debate in this House about the fact that the Secretary of State must be held accountable by Parliament. My noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames made the point, which has to be right, that the Secretary of State must also be held accountable by the courts. However, the Secretary of State also needs to be held accountable by the public and the patients, who have not had a huge showing in our debates thus far. I have concerns about this clause because I am not at all clear how the Secretary of State is going to satisfy X billion people by putting in £128 billion that he is accountable to them for if they are absolutely determined that they want him to be accountable to them.
To help the Minister when he takes this clause away and thinks about it, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that I was not convinced by the amendment. I am happy that he has made that part of his contribution to the review that my noble friend will conduct, but I hope that he does not press it to a vote because I for one would not be able to support it.
There are parts of the clause that the Minister really needs to look at, such as the phrasing in new Section 1C(a):
“any … person exercising functions … or providing services … is free to exercise those functions or provide those services in the manner that it considers most appropriate”.
From that, I am not clear—I do not necessarily want the Minister to tell me this today, but I ask him to think about this—at what point these actions start to become health service policy in their own right. We quote precedent in here. If someone takes an action because they think it is right in the circumstances, does that become a policy or a guideline? Where does the Secretary of State play any role in developing a policy for the NHS?
New Section 1C(b) goes on to say,
“unnecessary burdens are not imposed”.
I have to say to my noble friend that I do not understand what that means. Who decides whether it is a burden? Who decides whether the burden is unnecessary, and where can you challenge the decision whether a burden is a burden and when it becomes unnecessary? It is okay if you consider your action to be the most appropriate in the circumstances. My party occasionally gets criticised for being inclined to being a bit too individualistic, but you cannot run a health service in which everybody can make the decision that they think is most appropriate in the circumstances without a well defined political framework within which they would be expected to act.
I will tell my noble friend something that I have said to him in private but do not mind sharing in public. I spent 26 years at the other end of the Corridor. In all that time I never once voted against my party. Some in this House will see that as wimpish and craven, and some will see it as a fine expression of loyalty. Frankly, I do not mind how you see it. It is how I see it that is important to me.
I have not done a Committee stage of a Bill since I left the Cabinet in 1997, so I want Members of your Lordships’ House to understand that I am not having much fun in these Committee sittings. This is not something that comes naturally to me, and I have tried to reassure my noble friend that my participation in these debates is because of my commitment to the health service and my desire that it should be as excellent as possible. This is for the sake of my former constituents, who are patients. In that spirit, I hope my noble friend will take away Clauses 1 and 4 and think about them again.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I compliment the noble Lord on his speech and say that we hope to see him every day of this Committee.
Baroness Murphy
My Lords, could I try to cheer up the Committee? We are getting very gloomy about this topic. To me, this is one of the most important clauses in the Bill and we must support it. I hope that we can reassure colleagues on the opposition Benches that there is no intention, as far as I can see, to withdraw any accountability, which we have discussed at great length. Nor is there any intention to interfere with the ability of the Secretary of State to intervene when necessary. It is clearly written in the Bill that the Secretary of State has a mandate and a multi-year setting of objectives, but he has to stay clear of interfering until something is really at crisis point, is going wrong or is urgent. There is plenty of opportunity for him to interfere.
I want to intervene because we have gone into the stratosphere with ideological and constitutional issues. We have certainly talked about political interference, and I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, about this. As a senior manager, I have a little list of Ministers around this Chamber who I can tell noble Lords did or did not interfere. I am delighted to say that the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, was one of the least interfering of Ministers. Others around this Committee must wait for my judgment elsewhere.
Baroness Thornton
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness. I am listening carefully to her because she has great experience. Is she not talking about transferring the setting of targets, projects or whatever from the responsibility of Andrew Lansley as Secretary of State to Sir David Nicholson as head of the NHS Commissioning Board? If the problem, as she sees it, is the setting of too many targets and projects—although I do not know what that has to do with Clause 4— I am not sure what safeguards there are to stop that from happening anyway.
Baroness Murphy
Perhaps I may respond. It is a direct result of that chain of command that goes from the Secretary of State, to Ministers, to Sir David Nicholson and to everyone inside the Department of Health. It is a direct result of the impact on the management system.
Baroness Thornton
My point to the noble Baroness is that I do not believe that it will change.
Baroness Murphy
I am sorry but I think it is the direct result of Clause 4. I shall continue my theme, if I may.
It is vital that we do not get lost in the impact of what the setting of targets does to the management structure. If the Government set goals and we have key performance targets, at the moment hospitals, services and local commissioners have no responsibility for their strategic direction or goals. I talk as someone who has been a strategic health authority chairman and I know exactly what micromanagement of health authorities and trusts means. I will come on to foundation trusts and why it has not worked entirely with them.
The targets are passed down through commissioning organisations without any understanding of the capacity to deliver. No sooner has one directive been issued than another set of politically interesting goals arrives as an additional directive—without removing the first. All this has no connection to how healthcare is delivered at the front line to patients and it creates a sort of parallel universe of management that never really touches operational patient care.
In mental health services, the care programme approach was an absolutely classic example of something that was implemented without any thought being given to how the service was really delivered and it therefore took 10 years to put in place. In successful businesses, managers focus their time and attention on operational realities—on how to help staff solve problems and improve day-to-day operational performance. This is the front-line machine that implements management decisions. However, in the NHS, managers are not interested in the front line. At every level, they focus upwards to the next level and, as a health authority chairman, I was pretty horrified to find that at least 25 per cent to 30 per cent of my CEO’s time was taken up at meetings and other activities, to which we referred as “feeding the beast” of the Department of Health or of Ministers. I understand that in many trusts some 50 per cent of this time is taken up with managing the centre.
The preoccupation with satisfying the centre leaves front-line staff—unsupported and often demoralised—to cope with broken systems, unless they have a substitute in a charismatic clinician who leads them instead. That is why high-flying specialist units work exceptionally well and why everyday bog-standard services are often a disgrace. That is why meeting targets is often a game. Data are manipulated and money is diverted from one front line to another to achieve a target temporarily until the Minister’s attention is diverted to the next enthusiasm.
The four-hour waiting time target at A&E is a very good example. This was an admirable target—some would say it was not tough enough—but it was achieved only with horrendous diversion of funds from other front-line areas and a reordering of clinical priorities, but with no real change in hospital behaviours or any understanding by staff as to why they were doing it. Metrics for the purpose of compliance are almost always different from those that one would wish to collect to understand and improve patient care pathways. A&E services targets were achieved at the cost of diverting increasing numbers of patients into medical assessment units and we have ended up with an 11.8 per cent increase in emergency admissions and vast numbers of patents being admitted from A&E who would not previously have been admitted—all in the interests of reducing a particular target, but without any fundamental change in the way that hospitals are run.
That is what this autonomy clause is meant to assist—we seem to me to be forgetting that. We must have organisations within the health service which set their own objectives, manage them properly and start concentrating on the front line of patient care. There is ample accountability in the Bill to ensure this along with the proper regulatory system. I know that autonomy can lead to machismo behaviour and that it can go wrong. We do need tough regulation, but we need tough light-touch regulation, with a mandate that has been agreed beforehand. With that, we will see that this autonomy clause is utterly vital to the way that we should be developing the health service.
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, I wonder whether I may contribute. It is perhaps rather rash of me as it will be obvious that I have not been here all of the time, partly because I had not anticipated that we would have such a lengthy debate after the agreement that I thought we had reached on Clauses 1 and 4.
It is perhaps appropriate that I should intervene, not least because I am the third former Conservative Health Minister to speak in the debate. I ought to make it clear to my noble friend Lady Cumberlege that it is 2:1 to my noble friend Lord Mawhinney, as indeed I made clear to her in a more private conversation yesterday. Nevertheless, I am unhappy to find myself disagreeing with her, and also, for the second time in two days, disagreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. However, the fact is that I do disagree with them.
I cannot claim the record of my noble friend Lord Mawhinney of not having spoken against the Government since 1997. My record is much more sinful. I agree with every word that he said. I shall say that, rather than repeat it all. The problem with micromanagement is that what it means is to some extent dependent on the perception of the trouble that it is causing. Picking up the report published today, is it micromanagement for the Secretary of State to say that it is unacceptable to be leaving patients screaming all night, not to give them water, not to make sure that they are getting a proper diet and not to look after them or clean up for them? That could all be micromanagement, but the public will not regard it as micromanagement. They will say, “This is the NHS. You are responsible for the NHS. Get something done about it”.
At the core of this is a point that my noble friend made and I made in different terms much earlier in our discussions. The notion that the Secretary of State can wash his hands of certain things is for the birds. Two of us here have been Ministers for Health and others in the Chamber have also had that position. If things went badly enough wrong, the Secretary of State could not go to the Dispatch Box and say, “Nothing to do with me, guv. Go and ask the Commissioning Board. Go and ask Monitor”. It is nonsense, and we need to recognise that.
Lord Darzi of Denham
My Lords, I enter the debate speaking as a professional working in the health service, but also as someone who has had the opportunity and privilege of serving in government. I might know something, therefore, about the accountability of driving quality and improvements. I also had to learn fairly quickly about the accountability in this democracy and the accountability, as the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, put it very clearly, about the expenditure of the health service.
I will use the example of a piece of work that I had the privilege of leading. Many noble Lords in the Chamber helped me through it. It was a review of the London healthcare services, called Healthcare for London: A Framework for Action. I led this piece of work with 150 clinicians, in addition to 100 Londoners—members of the public and also patients. The work took place in 2006, after a formidable amount of expenditure and growth in the expenditure of the NHS. As someone who worked and lived in London, looking at the quality of some of these services, the case for change was quite striking. Thirty-one organisations in London were providing stroke services but none of them was meeting the international guidelines and standards for stroke services. One-third of our primary care providers were single-handed and patient satisfaction was well below the national average.
I will put inequality in health on one side, but there are inequalities in healthcare not far from this building. If you take the Underground from Westminster to Canning Town, you will find that life expectancy there is about eight years worse. Those were striking issues that had to be dealt with. The question is who deals with that important issue—the accountability for quality in improving and changing services. That was a fairly long, democratic process. It had very important principles. It had to be clinically led, locally owned and evidence-based. We made a strong pledge: if change is to happen, an alternative needs to be described to the local population and patients before such change happens.
A year later, a significant amount of public consultation ended in an agreement to drive those fairly radical changes in a city that is competitive globally, whether considering its financial services, its scientific output or its universities. That was 10 years after another review by my noble friend Lord Turnberg in the same city, trying to address the same challenges facing us back in 1996-97.
I could not agree more about accountability. I say that having had the privilege of serving in government. Ultimately, accountability has to rest with the Secretary of State. It is important to recognise that. However, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, to a degree. I will mention the K factor. I am not sure how many noble Lords have heard of the K factor. It was well before “The X Factor” was invented. The K factor refers to Kidderminster, where something interesting happened. There was a significant change in a little hospital, for which the whole driver was quality and improvement in facing the challenges of that local health economy. A local MP lost his seat and was replaced for a decade in the other House by a retired physician, who is no longer there. The K factor created a huge amount of sensitivity within the political world—in all political parties in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, was a brave man to throw out the person who came to challenge him about that reconfiguration. I was not the Secretary of State; I was the most junior Minister; I was starting on the learning curve and I wanted to be the most junior Minister in the department. I cannot remember a single week in which I was not lobbied about a change. It was never written; it was all mentioned over cups of tea.
There is a challenge. On the one hand, the Secretary of State needs to be accountable—I could not agree more about that—but at the same time the Secretary of State must have regard to evidence, if independently proved by groups of professionals, to make change happen. There must be a clear red dividing line between what I call the politics of saving votes and the politics of saving lives. There is a fine line between the two. One deals with accountability to the public purse and expenditure; one deals with accountability for quality. I have seen Secretaries of State who have had the leadership and strength to balance those two. I do not believe that such balancing could be written into legislation. It requires political leadership and political strength to make some of those tough decisions.
Change is happening all around us. Scientific discoveries have meant that life expectancy has increased by about 10 years since the creation of the NHS. We should not contaminate that with our own local agendas. It is unfortunate that even up to now our consumers—our patients—have not been empowered with the knowledge that I and other noble Lords in this House have of what is good and what is not good. Transparency is extremely important. I see evidence of that being reinforced by the Bill that I had the privilege of taking through in the past. Transparency is one way of getting the balance right between the politics of saving lives and the politics of saving votes.
Baroness Masham of Ilton
My Lords, I want to say only a few words. I cannot agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, that members of the public do not trust their Members of Parliament. Unfortunately, there have been a few problems, but surely we have moved on from there. I have just been to a meeting with about 20 Members of Parliament of all parties, who are supporting their constituents over the children’s heart surgery unit in Leeds. They trust their Members of Parliament more than they trust the people doing the review.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I hesitate to join in this debate, because it has been fascinating and wide ranging, and I hesitate particularly to come in after the noble Lord, Lord Darzi of Denham. However, I would like to pull out two factors which are important here.
First of all, there are inherent tensions. Fears have already been expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, in particular. One of the fears is whether we will have a National Health Service or a national health insurance, which will actually be an insurance programme. Those who belong to a GP and are part of a clinical commissioning group will then access those services which that clinical commissioning group determines to commission, irrespective of who the provider is, and there will actually no longer be a National Health Service.
That is linked to autonomy, because the worry in this clause—the second anxiety—is where the boundaries of that autonomy lie. This clause does not seem to stipulate any boundaries to the autonomy at all, nor indeed, whose autonomy overrules another’s. Will it be the Commissioning Board, or the clinical commissioning groups? Where is the hierarchy? Health services are actually a spectrum. You cannot divide the actions of one from another, because they have a knock-on effect. A clear and very simple example is that delayed diagnosis in primary care results in later presentation and more expenditure in secondary care, but more importantly, in poorer outcomes for the patient, who has effectively been withheld from accessing expertise for too long.
Behind all that is a worry, because general practice per se is not an NHS employed service. GPs are individual contractors whose general medical services contract is remarkably poorly defined. It may be that the autonomy of the Commissioning Board will allow it to define very clearly what is in general medical services and what is out. The whole concept of GMS suffered hugely when the 24-hour responsibility went and out-of-hours services came in. That fragmented, to a large extent, what GPs did.
It is completely mistaken to believe that liberating the NHS depends on these clauses in the Bill. I have my name to one of the amendments to delete one of the clauses, but I do not see, from the debate that we have had today, how deleting the clauses will stop the changes to liberate the NHS that everybody has been arguing for.
Unfortunately for patients—and the NHS service is there for patients—the NHS has indeed become risk averse in a culture where the managers have become frightened, for whatever reason, of speaking out, and of taking patient-oriented decisions, and have often put pressure on clinicians to not do what they have wanted to do. I fear that behind that, too, there has been peer pressure and a mistaken view that it is unprofessional to show that you care. There has been a view that, if you step out from the local culture to do what is right for the patient, even though it may not be right for the service or the system, that can result in severe disciplinary action against an individual. We see the extreme of that with people who whistleblow and speak out for services. However, I do not think that any of that will be affected whether the autonomy clauses are in or out of the Bill.
In the past, I have argued with the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, that the NHS should not be a political football and that there should be some distance between political interference and the way that the service is delivered on the ground. However, I must admit that I had never imagined that we might be discussing what could potentially be complete fragmentation of the service.
I should like to run through some of the boundaries that I think are very important in discussing this matter, and I know that we will be debating this further in relation to the role of the Secretary of State. Like others in the Committee, I commend the Minister for the way in which he handled the debate on Clause 1 and for his very positive approach to the discussions that we all need to have on these clauses at the beginning of the Bill.
Do the people with the autonomy have the skills and capabilities to exercise that autonomy, and how will those skills and capabilities be measured? How will autonomy interact, when you are trying to drive forward collaboration and integration and trying to drive performance management, with a decent level of services and consistency to improve quality if one part of the system decides, for whatever reason, that it does not want to provide a particular service or part of it? Will there be a requirement on these autonomous bodies to publish the evidence of their performance, or would such a request be deemed to be burdensome and to be impeding their autonomy?
I was particularly struck by a line in the impact assessment, which states that the reforms will create,
“a statutory basis for the NHS Commissioning Board and consortia, to protect them from interference in commissioning decisions at both a local and national level. To ensure their autonomy, both board and consortia remain solely responsible for their commissioning decisions, and neither are obligated to gain approval from local councils or health and wellbeing boards”.
In other words, the K factor would not be able to function.
In the past, I have understood the concept of earned autonomy, where the power and ability to take decisions at a more local level come when there is proof that quality has been driven up. However, I fear that these clauses will not do that, and they may just give unfettered autonomy to organisations which may be ill equipped to cope with the range of responsibilities that will suddenly be thrust upon them.
Baroness Tonge
My Lords, I intend to be very brief because we have already had a long debate, but I am bursting to say something. We have heard very erudite and learned speeches, not least from my noble friend Lord Marks, who put the situation very clearly. However, I am a simple soul. I told your Lordships at Second Reading that I was a barefoot doctor trying to protect patients and my staff from the ravages of health service reorganisation, and I want to try to tell the Committee briefly how they see the combination of these two clauses.
If Clause 4 were adopted, that could lead to different sorts of health services all over the country. Provision would not be equal throughout the country and people would not like that. On the other hand, if Clause 1 were amended after discussion to make sure that the Secretary of State had a duty to provide certain services, that would rule out Clause 4—there would no longer be autonomy because, as I understand it, the Secretary of State would be able to say, “No, you must provide this tariff of services”.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, this has been an important and thoughtful debate which I am sure will inform the discussions which the noble Earl is about to embark upon with colleagues across the House. I rise to speak to Amendment 38 on a much narrower point. In the spirit of that amendment I will undertake not to impose any burden on the Committee in terms of taking a disproportionate amount of time to deal with it. The amendment refers to paragraph (b) of new Section 1C, which the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, also referred to in what I thought was a masterly and devastating critique of Clause 4 as a whole.
The amendment would replace “unnecessary” with “disproportionate” in terms of the relief of burdens on organisations within the framework of the health service. The noble Lord is quite right to say that “unnecessary burdens” could mean anything. He might think that “disproportionate burdens” could also mean almost anything, but at least it gives a sense of direction which would be more acceptable to your Lordships. The Government as a whole are somewhat obsessed with burdens in the belief that almost any duty—whether in terms of employment law or other issues, notional concerns about health and safety or even human rights legislation—is deemed to be somehow a dreadful burden. What is a burden to one set of people may be a perfectly reasonable duty in the eyes of others. In this particularly sensitive context of a key public service affecting everybody in the country as a patient or potential patient, it seems necessary to err on the side of caution when setting out a stall which could lead to great difficulty in any sensible degree of regulation. Of course one can overprescribe regulation. One can also underprescribe it. As it stands the clause appears to err very much in the direction of the latter. I hope therefore that the Government will look again at the drafting of the clause and that some move can be made in the direction set out in Amendment 38 in my name and in that of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker.
Baroness Wall of New Barnet
My Lords, I had not intended to participate in the debate because I did not arrive until it had started, but I have been here a long time now and want to share with people how it feels on the ground. What the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, said is absolutely true. I do not envy the noble Earl because I think that the analysis that the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, gave is exactly how it feels. There is that dilemma. The noble Baroness congratulated us on now having a decision from the Secretary of State. We do, but the decision is bound up in another clause, which brings about another kind of action that we must take. It has not removed anything; it has just given us another dilemma and delay in what we must do.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, that I only wish that everybody in his position did what he did. Though I have five years of experience, I am not medically qualified; I am just somebody who cares about the people that I have responsibility for as the chair. My experience from those years was often of political interference. I ask noble Lords to forgive me for being emotive about this, but it is absolutely true. We had consultation for many years, authorised by the independent review body. The Secretary of State at the time, Alan Johnson, said, “Whatever the review body says, we will go with it”. That was perfect. Then we had a hold-up and a change of government. The new Secretary of State, Andrew Lansley, then came to our trust and said, “This isn’t going to happen. We want people on the ground to be able to say, ‘Yes, if I want this service, I can have it here, and, yes, if I want my baby here, I can have the baby here’”. Both those services were questionable in terms of their clinical reliability. They were not unsafe, because we would not be doing it otherwise, but certainly questionable. And so we started all over again.
A year later, we have gone through not a consultation but the four tests, where the clinical members of the local authority team went through the same process as was involved in the previous consultation—is it clinically safe or is it not? It took a year or so for the Secretary of State to come back with another response to that. That was another stall until, just a matter of weeks ago, we received a letter from the Secretary of State addressed to the local authority—because it had put the case to him—which said, “Yes, I think that the BEH strategy should go ahead, but, actually, I think that you should consider other things as well”. Those things cut right through the BEH strategy.
Local MPs are very open about the fact that they have interceded and expressed their views. They are very proud to say, “I’ve spoken to Andrew about this and I’m not going to have that”. This goes on all the time—I am not sure that this is inappropriate language to use in this House I ask your Lordships to forgive me if I am saying things that I should not; I am just trying to tell noble Lords what it feels like as somebody who is working in the health service on behalf of patients. That is how it feels. I do not know whether political interference by the Secretary of State, as I see it, can be removed by having the national Commissioning Board make the decisions, because my view would be that MPs will always go to whoever can make an intervention in Parliament. That goes for MPs from all parties; it is not about the present Government.
I do not envy the noble Earl in the decisions that he has to make about this, but the view of the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, is very much attuned to what I see in reality. There is a dilemma; there is that interference. But, on the other hand, there are major decisions that have to be made that can be made only by the Secretary of State in the sense of his or her national perspective. I have no words of wisdom, but I have a lot of feelings. Please can we get this right?
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I have added my name to those opposing Clause 4. We have had a very good debate, to which my noble friends Lord Darzi and Lady Wall have brought an element of reality. However, their remarks do not take us from the point of wondering whether this is the right clause in terms of autonomy. They have both succeeded in pointing to the problem that exists, and I am not sure that the Bill solves it.
Autonomy, from the ancient Greek, means,
“one who gives oneself their own law … In medicine, respect for the autonomy of patients is an important goal … though it can conflict with a competing ethical principle, namely beneficence”.
It might be thought that a health and social care Bill would reflect the second part of the above definition—culled, I have to say, from Wikipedia—given the concern for the interests and dignity of patients. However, such is not the case. Clause 4 seeks to insert a new section into the National Health Service Act 2006 under the rubric: “The Secretary of State’s duty as to promoting autonomy”. The clause requires the Secretary of State when exercising functions in relation to the health service, so far they are consistent with the interests of the health service—not, it may be noted, in the interests of patients—to act with a view to securing certain things that the clause then goes on to list.
I had a discussion about this clause with the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, yesterday or the day before. I say to her that the fact that we both seem to have completely different views of what this clause seeks to do actually tells us something about it and its drafting. We totally disagree about what we think this clause seeks to achieve. That alone should make us think that perhaps we need to go back to look at this clause.
Clause 4 places upon the Secretary of State a duty to promote autonomy, as we have said. We feel that this clause is part of the general shift of the Bill to denude the responsibilities of the Secretary of State, because—viewed alongside of the removal of the Secretary of State’s current powers under Section 8 of the 2006 Act to give directions to PCTs and SHAs—it significantly dilutes the Secretary of State’s powers to influence the provision of health services. Independent legal advice from Stephen Cragg QC, for example, commented on the consequences of Clause 4:
“If the Secretary of State attempts to use his or her powers to impose requirements on commissioning consortia, for example, then there could well be a judicial review challenge from a consortium which opposed the requirements on the basis that they infringed the principle of autonomy in the new Section 1C and could not be justified as necessary or essential. This approach replaces the, more or less, unfettered power that the Secretary of State has to make directions currently to be found in Section 8 of the NHS Act 2006 with a duty not to interfere unless essential to do so”.
The emphasis on autonomy links to the change in the role of the Secretary of State, as was explained wonderfully and adequately by the noble Lord, Lord Marks.
Since the founding of the NHS, the Secretary of State has always had powers of direction and intervention over NHS bodies, which enabled him or her to control the system. While some providers such as foundation trusts could be given earned autonomy—as was referred to by other noble Lords—the Secretary of State retained control through commissioning and the nature of contracts with foundation trusts.
This is a very important clause, and nothing that has been said in this debate makes me think that I was wrong to put my name on behalf of these Benches to the Question relating to clause standing part of the Bill. I appreciate that we will be having a broad discussion of these matters along with Clauses 10 and 1 but, unless the Minister has something very significant to say about how he sees this clause evolving, I absolutely have to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Marks, that this can come out of the Bill because of all the other powers that remain in it, which we will look at in due course.
Finally, I thank the Minister for his letter to me, which was circulated around the House. I thank him and his staff and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and her colleagues for the fact that we are finding a way forward to having a discussion which I hope and trust will bear fruit.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I, too, think this has been a very valuable debate and I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to it. I do mean that. Ministers always like to hear support, and I have had some of that today, but at the same time no self-respecting Minister would wish to brush aside the kinds of concerns that have been voiced this afternoon about the effect of this clause. I certainly do not wish to do that; hence my offer to engage in discussions with those noble Lords whose concerned voices have been heard.
Following the consensus that we reached at last week’s Committee session on that proposal, I express the hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment at the end of this debate and that we will use the time between now and Report to reflect on the concerns that we have heard expressed about Clause 4—and, indeed, on Clause 1 last week. I recall from discussions in the Chamber on 2 November that the Committee had little appetite to hear me dwell on Clause 1 or the amendments to it. I am therefore going to keep my remarks brief. However, I hope that the Committee will find it helpful if I provide a bit of context to this clause.
As I said at Second Reading, our proposals for the NHS involve a fundamental shift in the balance of power away from politicians and on to patients themselves, as well as to doctors and other health professionals. This is not an abdication or divestment of power by politicians but a shift. I think that we all agree that empowering front-line organisations offers enormous potential to unleash innovation and to drive up the efficiency and quality of services. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, to my mind, said it all. That is why the Bill retains the key powers that the Secretary of State needs in order to remain properly accountable but removes his current sweeping powers to delegate and give directions to other bodies.
Instead, the Bill sets out roles and responsibilities in primary legislation that local commissioning will be carried out by clinical commissioning groups—with their own distinct statutory duties, set by Parliament—rather than by PCTs acting under the direction of the Minister of the day. Ministers will have specific but extensive powers to set requirements for commissioners, in particular through the mandate to the NHS Commissioning Board and through regulations known as standing rules. As the noble Lord, Lord Warner, observed, I am sure that we will give some thought to the impact of the autonomy duty when, in future Committee sessions, we debate the clauses that give the Secretary of State these powers.
However, there is a clear need for Ministers to have sufficient flexibility to respond to changing circumstances in the health service. Given that, there is very little limit on what or how many objectives or requirements the Secretary of State can impose. That leaves open the risk that a Government—or indeed the board, which has an equivalent duty at Clause 20—could introduce process targets or burdensome rules that inappropriately interfere with front-line clinical decision-making. That is the last thing anyone wants. To my mind, this makes it vital to have some kind of countervailing force to establish the principle that Ministers should use their powers carefully. We believe that the autonomy duty provides this important safeguard, enabling organisations to act in the best interests of patients, free from the risk that Ministers or the board revert to a command-and-control style in order to achieve their objectives. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, put the point very well.
The duty is therefore an important symbol of the shift of power that the Bill seeks to achieve. I agree with my noble friend Lord Marks that the autonomy duty must be subsidiary to the general duties of the Secretary of State, including, in particular, his duties under Clause 1 of the Bill to promote a comprehensive health service and to exercise his functions so as to secure the provision of services. Although we believe that the duty of autonomy would not inhibit the Secretary of State in exercising his overarching powers and duties as set out in Clause 1, I recognise, as I say, that there are concerns about legal clarity. I therefore welcome the prospect of further discussions with my noble friend and other noble Lords outside this Chamber as to how we might put this matter beyond doubt.
Baroness Jay of Paddington
My Lords, I apologise for interrupting during the Minister’s conclusion but I hope this will be helpful. I want to explore whether he can just help me by describing what he sees as the scope of these discussions, in terms of the clauses to be discussed. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, pointed out for example in his very helpful intervention when he made passing reference to it, the proposed new Section 13F of the 2006 Act, at Clause 20 in the Bill, is very relevant. It may be helpful to the House to know that the Constitution Committee was invited to look at this again. We have met since the last day of Committee and have agreed to look again at Clauses 1, 4, 10 and 20 precisely because of that interrelated matter. Could the Minister help us on that?
Earl Howe
I am grateful to the noble Baroness. As she has indicated, there is certainly a read-across from Clause 4 into Clause 20, and I readily accept the suggestion that we should factor in issues that emerge from Clause 10.
I am clear that a successful process will be one that can take account of views from all political parties and the Cross Benches. As well as hearing in full from those Peers, many of whom have put their names to amendments and have become particular experts on this issue, there is also an implicit legal perspective to this and I believe that an important building block will be to engage with the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House and other legal experts in this House on these points. To start that dialogue, I propose to meet next week with a number of noble Lords, if they are willing, to explore the process for going forward. Following that, I will write again to all Peers setting out the proposed process in more detail. I hope that that is helpful.
I have very clear answers for the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Warner, and other noble Lords to the concerns that they have raised. However, for the reasons that I have set out, if they will bear with me, I shall refrain now from providing a detailed commentary on the amendments in this group. I hope that, with the prospect of future discussions that will factor in the valuable points in this debate, the noble Lord will feel able, for the time being, to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Warner
My Lords, there is a film showing in local cinemas called “We Need to Talk About Kevin”; I think that this excellent debate has shown that we do indeed need to talk about Clause 4. I do not intend to comment on all the excellent contributions that have been made. I just want to say two things in conclusion.
I think that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has provided an excellent forensic analysis of what is wrong with this clause. My personal view is that he has holed this clause below the water-line. I hope that the Minister, in conducting these cross-party discussions, will really keep in the front of his mind the easy solution that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has helpfully given to the Committee, which is that we simply drop the clause.
Secondly, I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, that I do not disagree with her about many of the issues that she raised. However, if she is really concerned about reducing political interference in decisions on service reconfiguration, I would direct her towards Amendment 304 in the names of myself, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. There is room for another name on that amendment, which will indeed actually reduce political interference in this area. So I commend it to her. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
My Lords, if I may, I will say to your Lordships’ Committee that this group of amendments is about Kevin. It is also about Kate. This is perhaps the first time that we have had an opportunity to look at a group of amendments that will have an immediate and direct effect on the patients and patient outcomes. In moving Amendment 39, I will also speak to Amendment 41 standing in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and the noble Lords, Lord Walton and Lord Warner.
I should say from the outset that I am extremely supportive of other amendments in this group from noble Lords. Indeed, the fact that noble Lords from every quarter of the House recognised the importance of research and wanted to support this group of amendments demonstrates the real commitment that there is in seeing research at the centre of the new National Health Service.
I listened to the previous debate, and much of the debate on Clause 1, and so far a great deal of the debate has been about structures. Not one piece of empirical evidence has been brought forward that demonstrates that the proposed structures, either now or in previous health Bills, have been there with evidence that they will improve the service. On what we are about to discuss now, there is a mass of empirical evidence to demonstrate that putting research at the centre of the National Health Service will improve patient care and outcomes—and that, if I may respectfully say so, is really what this Bill should be addressing. How do we make things better for our patients and how do we give clinicians the very skills, tools, drugs and procedures that they need to make it better?
Your Lordships received this week a lovely bound book by the British Heart Foundation entitled 50 Years at the Heart of Health. Throughout it there are a number of very interesting statistics. One that I draw to noble Lords’ attention is fact number 24. It says that in 1961 somebody died from cardiovascular disease in the UK every 98 seconds; in 2009, it was every 174 seconds. The reason for that dramatic change was twofold: first, the clinicians dealing with those patients; and, secondly, the research they had at their disposal to make the treatments more effective. We celebrate the fact that we ended up with a significant drop of some 78 per cent in outcomes of deaths, but the reality is that far too many patients still die of cardiovascular disease, and we need the research and new techniques to be able to deal with this.
At the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, an experimental new treatment using gene therapies to help prevent the onset of blindness is in its early stage of clinical trials. The use of gene therapies and of genomics and bioinformatics will make a radical difference to how we deal with our patients in future, offering them if not personalised healthcare at least far more targeted support for whatever disease they have.
Other noble Lords will speak from great professional and personal depth about the use of research and its importance. I declare two interests: first, my belief that training the workforce in giving access to research is the best way in which to improve patient outcomes—and I think noble Lords would agree with that; and, secondly, I chair the Association of Medical Research Charities, whose 127 member charities contribute more than £1 billion a year to medical research, some 30 per cent of all expenditure in this area.
We see daily the results of good clinical practice and research, but we also see the challenges that lie ahead. Of course, the UK starts from a very strong position. We are simply—and again there is clear evidence to support this—the most productive health research nation on earth when you judge the dollar input against research success. That fact was confirmed just last month by the global research report from Thomson Reuters. What we do not do nearly well enough is bring research to clinical practice quickly enough or exploit our advantage vigorously enough. To deal with that we require a quantum change in the regulatory framework and we need to use our NHS patient database far more effectively, which is why I am delighted that Amendment 40A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, who I will call my noble friend, begins the debate about how we use the National Health Service database much more effectively.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, I warmly support this group of amendments, so ably proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Willis. The questions which he has posed to the Minister are of considerable importance. I do not propose to repeat them, but I look forward to hearing the answers.
In my professional lifetime, there is no doubt at all that research has transformed the practice of medicine. Research is the lifeblood of medicine. After all, antibiotics have been effective in depleting very many of the infectious diseases which I knew as a young doctor. Programmes of vaccination and inoculation have been successful in banishing smallpox from the world and, in the near future, it is probable that poliomyelitis will become a disease of yesterday as well—it is likely that there will be no such cases in the world in future. The conditions of childhood which so ravished children when I was a young doctor, such as diphtheria, scarlet fever and, to an extent, measles and German measles have been successfully controlled by vaccination. In particular, in relation to rubella or German measles, that programme has prevented the birth of children with many birth defects which resulted from infection with that virus in pregnant women.
There is no doubt, too, that the developments in diagnostic techniques, imaging, computerised tomography and other techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging and so on, have transformed diagnosis. So, too, have many other techniques which have been introduced into medicine in the course of the last few years. Now, many painful and devastating operations have been prevented by interventional radiology, whereby under X-ray control, for example, in people with heart disease the passage of catheters into the coronary arteries can deal with that disease, even though in some cases there is a need for open-heart surgery. I could go on: there is hip replacement and joint replacement of all kinds, or the use of steroids in the management of autoimmune diseases. These have transformed the progress of medicine and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, today's discovery in basic medical science brings tomorrow's development in patient care. This is a lesson which we all have to recognise. That is called translational research; you translate the result of the basic research in the laboratory, or basic clinical research, into effective treatment of disease.
All of these things are happening all around us and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, the evidence is clear that when one looks at research citations and publications in learned journals, for instance, there are many more published in the United States but, if you translate those citations according to population this country, the United Kingdom, in its research productivity in the field of medicine, stands the highest in the world. Yet obstacles and problems which have been encountered over the years have to be overcome.
Fifteen years ago, on behalf of your Lordships’ Select Committee on Science and Technology, I chaired a sub-committee inquiry into research in the NHS. From its very beginning, the National Health Service provided limited funds for research purposes and there was a locally operated clinical research scheme. It was helpful in that it helped many young doctors and medical scientists to take their first steps in research by receiving small grants to help them to conduct such investigations, but the actual amount of money expended in that way and the results of this research were very limited.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 40 and 42 in my name and those of other noble Lords. I also support Amendments 39, 40A, 41, 74, 89E and 199ZA in the names of other noble Lords and to many of which I have added my own name.
The noble Lord, Lord Willis, did us a great service in setting out the argument for strengthening these provisions regarding the Secretary of State’s duties on research. There is a bit of a conundrum, as he put it very well, about how a Secretary of State and indeed the NHS protects research and development in a devolved NHS. That is a difficult issue, and it is not good enough simply to have a general duty on the Secretary of State. As the noble Lord, Lord Walton, says, we need more flesh on the bone that gives some comfort to the idea that the Secretary of State, whoever he or she is, will actually take an interest and pursue some other aspects around the duty of promoting R&D. It is difficult to see how that duty could be protected without some degree of capability to intervene and ensure that the NHS pulls its weight in co-operating with R&D.
I turn to Amendments 40 and 42 in my name. I speak from the background of having been for two years the Minister responsible for NHS R&D when we started the reforms of the structure of R&D in the Department of Health and the NHS to produce much more focus to the R&D programme, to streamline some of its approval processes and to improve the translation of research to clinical care—the so-called movement from the lab to the bedside.
I, too, pay tribute to the work done by Dame Sally Davies—she was just plain Sally Davies in those days—and the leadership and persistence that she has shown in this area. The ideas that we were putting forward then for a National Institute of Health Research, which to some extent was based on the NIH model in the US, were not uniformly welcomed, if I may put it that way, by everyone across the NHS. It was deemed to be a bit too interventionist in some of the activities that were going on in the name of research and development in some of the dusty corners of the NHS. We have come a long way in that period. That is the background from which I speak, because I am keen to ensure that we do not go backwards in this area as we devolve more autonomy to the NHS.
It is relevant that I was also a member of this House’s Science and Technology Committee, where I had the privilege of working on the inquiry into genomic medicine under the extremely skilful chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. That experience has convinced me that we need to feature R&D much more prominently in the Bill, particularly the issue of translating R&D findings into clinical practice that benefits NHS patients. That is what Amendment 40 attempts to do.
However, Amendment 40 goes further in two other aspects of successful development of research findings and their application in clinical practice: the back-up of information technology and the informatics skills, which are often inadequate to back up basic scientific discoveries. One of the things that the—in my view much maligned—national programme for IT did was to make it easier for researchers to access the very important patient database that the NHS provides for them, and it makes it easier for them to collect the kind of patient samples, if I may put it as crudely as that, that they need for their research. However, the genomic medicine report also showed that we have some serious problems in this country about informatics skills in carrying forward R&D in the health and life sciences area. That is why those parts of the back-up services get a special mention in Amendment 40.
I turn to Amendment 42. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, put his finger on it: if the NIHR disappears into the maw of the National Commissioning Board, how will its budget be protected? Will there not be a temptation, if times are hard, to dip into that pot and use it for operational matters such as the delivery of services? As a Minister and a civil servant who has worked in this field for many years, I can say that there is a great temptation when the going gets rough financially to—I shall put this as kindly as I can—reach into the pot of R&D, and indeed the pot of education and training, which we will be coming to later. I have watched people, who shall remain nameless, find themselves unable to resist that temptation. That is why I feel strongly that we should put something in the Bill along the lines of Amendment 42 to try to ensure good conduct.
Sometimes R&D is a bit slow in spending its budget. That is quite convenient if you are running into a bit of financial difficulty during the financial year. What happens is that money gets held back because of some pressing need and it will not really matter if we take a bit longer to get on with this bit of R&D. I assure the House that I have observed a Chancellor who managed to announce the same NHS R&D budget increase in two successive Budgets, and he was not spotted by anyone in the media. It is possible for some of this “peas under the pot” manoeuvring to take place. We are talking about political temptation, and Amendment 42 would provide some encouragement to resist it. The temptation to dip into R&D budgets is of course not confined to the NHS, but we have an opportunity with the Bill to ensure better behaviour in the NHS regarding R&D.
Lord Turnberg
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 40A and 199ZA in my name. I also want to comment on some other amendments in this group. I speak as a one-time medical researcher, a trustee of a number of medical research charities, and as a scientific adviser to the Association of Medical Research Charities. In that I work closely with my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Willis.
Research, as we have heard, is not an optional extra. It cannot be added on to the NHS as and when someone thinks it is needed; it is a vital and integral part and it is good to see an acknowledgement of that in the Bill, even if it falls a little short of full endorsement. Research is no cottage industry, with more than £1 billion coming from the research charities every year and almost the same amount going in from each of the Medical Research Council and the NIHR. That is a total of around £3 billion a year. As for the Department of Health’s contribution of almost £1 billion, I want to say how much Dame Sally Davies's role in securing that is appreciated, as indeed is that of the noble Earl who has been a great ally. However, Amendment 42 raises the question of whether this funding is secure for the future.
I can only re-emphasise what the noble Lords, Lord Willis and Lord Warner, have said. Even though research funding amounts to less than 1 per cent of the NHS budget—a pitifully small proportion in an organisation of this size—can we be reassured that it will not fall easy victim to the cuts we are going to see over the next few years? Is it really essential for this to be distributed through the Commissioning Board? Is it possible that it could come more directly via the Department of Health? I hope that the noble Earl will give us some comfort on this amendment. This is clearly of some importance and we almost certainly will have to come back to it at a later stage.
As we have heard, medical research in the United Kingdom punches way above its weight. By any measure, our outputs of research findings come high in any international league table and the fruits of our research are having a major impact on our health. We are living longer and healthier lives and one has only to look around your Lordships’ House to see evidence of that. I suspect that there are few of us who are not taking one or more pills, keeping us in fine fettle. As the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, the public at large is well aware of the benefits. According to a number of surveys, more than 90 per cent of patients and the public want us to do this research and, furthermore, want to be engaged in it as patients. They want this even if it does not benefit them directly but benefits only future generations. However, they also know that any patient who is part of a trial incidentally gets a better deal and better care as part of the research process.
They are enthusiastic supporters but that is not the only reason why we should be supporting research. There are considerable economic benefits too. The most recent of several studies that have shown this, Medical Research: What's it Worth? supported by the Rand Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, clearly showed that we gain between 35 and 40 per cent return per annum for every pound we put in. Although it takes several years for research done now to bear fruit—today it is coming from research done some years ago—the returns come from less sickness and absenteeism from work, greater productivity and less sickness benefit payments.
Research is a good thing all round and this Bill is a great opportunity to make sure we gain its full benefits. Amendment 39 emphasises the need for the Secretary of State to take his expressed desire to support research seriously and I strongly support that amendment. Amendment 199ZA, in my name, brings the same pressure on to the clinical commissioning groups and alters the wording in exactly the same way. It is at this level where I fear we have seen one of the biggest obstacles to promoting clinical research up to now. The same survey I mentioned earlier showing that patients are keen to be involved in research also showed that GPs by and large were antipathetic to and at best uninterested in research. Few GPs engage in research directly themselves, but that is not the main problem. It is their unhappiness at having to spare any time, for example, in seeking the approval of their patients for them even to be approached by researchers and asked for their consent.
Researchers have to ask patients for consent but can do so only if the GP asks the patients for them first, and they are not at all keen. They say that there is not enough time. Yet their role is critical, not only to facilitate clinical research performed by others but to be responsible, through the CCGs, for commissioning those extra support costs that arise when research, funded by charities, the MRC and so on, is carried out. Research on patients supported, for example, by the British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research UK, often results in additional costs due to extra visits or more routine blood tests. Traditionally these should be funded by the commissioners of services. This Bill provides just the opportunity we need to make sure that those at the coal face, responsible for commissioning, can facilitate and fund this research.
I hope the Minister will consider the need to accept this or a similar amendment and examine how we might provide the inducements necessary to GPs and CCGs. A failure of CCGs to take on responsibility for creating the right environment in which we can gain the full value of external funders will be damaging.
I come now to the difficult issue of the use of patient data. How can we make sure it is possible to use clinical information about patients for research purposes? New Section 14X, to be inserted by Clause 23, describes the duties of clinical commissioning groups to promote research and includes the need to promote the use of evidence obtained from research for improving the health service. That is very good, but it says nothing of the other way round; of how we can use patients’ data for research purposes. The amendment in my name, Amendment 199ZA, emphasises this point. The difficulty has been well rehearsed: how does one gain access to identifiable information about patients for research into their diseases while at the same time protecting their confidentiality and giving them all the reassurances that they need? It so happens that well over 90 per cent of patients are happy for information about them to be used for research, but the current system of safeguards goes well beyond the requirements of the Data Protection Act and is stifling much important research.
When data about patients are fully anonymised—a horrible word—and it is impossible for anyone including the researchers to identify a patient, then there is little or no trouble. However, when it is necessary for the researchers to know who the patients are, we get into problems. If, for instance, a researcher needed to use the cancer registry to look at whether patients with a given cancer were subject to some factors in their environment—for example, whether they lived near electricity pylons or some hazardous waste plant—then they would need to seek consent from each patient. But what if many have died in the mean time or are untraceable because they have moved away or gone abroad? It becomes impossible to do the research. The National Information Governance Board was set up for this purpose, but it is no more. I know that the Government intend to try to help with this now. I know that as a first step the patient information leaflet produced by the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, explaining how data about them can be used, has gone out to GP practices in Scotland and soon will be sent out in England and the rest of the UK. That is an excellent start. The Clinical Practice Research Data Link has also been set up, but I wonder whether the Minister can say how far we have got with that? Will it achieve what is needed: the rapid access to data for researchers with the approval of patients? Meanwhile this amendment seeks to flush out the need to address this hurdle to some important research.
Amendment 41 brings up the important issue of funding for public health research. Here I speak as a former chairman of the Public Health Laboratory Service, the forerunner of the Health Protection Agency, which is also disappearing. I cannot speak too highly of the marvellous work it did and does in protecting the public’s health. It is a fantastic organisation. It works on outbreaks of food poisoning, epidemics of flu and immunisation programmes against a whole host of infections, to say nothing of its work in radiological protection and on all sorts of biohazards. The point is that this organisation is at the forefront of its field and is the envy of the world because it is able to do fantastic world-leading research. It is highly dependent on a continuing research effort to keep ahead of the infections and other hazards that are continually evolving. It is vital that it continues to have access to research grant funds, particularly external grant income from the whole range of potential funders to which it has access now, such as the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and so on. I hope the noble Earl will reassure us on this. His Written Answer to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, yesterday did not give any confidence that the Public Health Laboratory Service will be able to apply to external bodies for funding.
Then there are the directors of public health and their teams. They, too, should be enabled to conduct high-quality research. The amendment makes that clear. How will they receive the necessary support and encouragement when they transfer into the local authorities? It is not at all clear that local authorities are keyed into this, so some reassurance on this point would be helpful. Most of these amendments are probing—I think they all are—and seek simply to gain a greater understanding of the ways in which I hope the Government will support the research effort.
Lord Ribeiro
My Lords, I shall speak in support of Amendments 40 and 42, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, are very much appreciated and welcomed. They reflect the Government’s acceptance of the importance of research and making this an express duty on the Secretary of State.
Some years ago, Professor Sackett made the medical profession aware of the term “evidence-based medicine”. I should like to think that we have all adopted it in our clinical practices over the years. As a surgeon, I speak from a surgical perspective. In the 18th century John Hunter was approached by Edward Jenner with his dilemma about children in Gloucestershire who were being afflicted by cowpox. He wrote to John Hunter, saying, “I’m thinking about doing something about this and would like to cure the children in this area with a vaccination made from cowpox”. John Hunter replied, “Don’t think about it, do the experiment”. We in surgery consider Hunter the father of scientific surgery but our problem is that we are, perhaps, not quite as cerebral as our physician colleagues. All they have to do is learn the discipline, acquire the knowledge and prescribe the tablets. On the other hand, we not only have to learn but must then apply our knowledge in carrying out the operation. There are two skills that we must acquire. For us poor surgeons, it is often a long sentence—spent not only in a laboratory but in the theatre, putting into practice what we have learnt.
Earlier, a noble Lord—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Warner—used the term “from the bedside to the bench”, which is very important. The whole concept behind translational research has been to get our trainees and doctors away from idea that all they have to do is stay in the lab, beavering away. It is about the patient. One of the things that surgeons try to do is take a problem from the bedside into the lab, apply stringent tests to it and then bring it back in the form of treatment, which might be by medication or an operative technique.
Lord Ribeiro
I rather suspected that the noble Lord did. That is why I felt able to make that reference. None the less, I launched a big campaign at the time because here was a budget—part of the NPEC budget—for nurses, doctors and so on that was being raided. It should have been a ring-fenced budget for training, yet the money was taken out of that budget to meet the NHS deficit. There is a real danger for the present Government if a situation should occur whereby the £1 billion budget—and there is no reason why it should be more than that—that has been set aside for research, particularly as the Secretary of State has taken responsibility to promote research, was found to come under the auspices of the chief executive of the NHS Commissioning Board, and that at times of trouble and trial that that money could be used.
I wanted to speak in line with what I said yesterday, although some noble Lords may doubt that I have spoken briefly. However, I speak in strong support of Amendments 40 and 42.
Lord Patel
My Lords, my brief is brief—and I shall be brief. First, I congratulate the Government on putting the need to promote medical research at the centre stage of the Bill. We have criticised a lot of things and we may criticise some more, but the recognition that medical research is important to improve healthcare has been stated throughout the Bill.
It would be surprising if I said that I do not support these amendments—I support every one of them. By the way, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, that he was lucky that the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, was not in his place when he said that surgeons do not do research. He might have given the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, a tour around his department.
Lord Ribeiro
I gave a historical perspective. We started research in the 18th century. We may not have done it as well as the physicians, but that is when we started.
Lord Patel
I should also tell the noble Lord that his laparoscopic training is also historical because robots are used now.
I have brief comments, but I shall focus particularly on the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that refers to the need for informatics to be properly established to promote research in healthcare. One of the key areas in biomedical and clinical research in the UK is focused on translational research, as other noble Lords have said, to try to get research into clinical care.
Informatics plays a key role in our ability to do translational research. There are three domains of informatics in biomedical research—biomedical informatics, medical informatics and translational research informatics. Translational research informatics is about getting multidisciplinary research into clinical practice, with clinical trials being the first step to it. As we have heard, we have notable successes from our medical research into clinical translation. I say with hesitation that we think we are leaders in the world, but we are not quite the leaders—although we come pretty close. However, we can do better, and to do so we have to have what is required to promote research and its use into translation. Therefore, we will have to develop all three domains and incorporate what we already have—health information involving the medical records to which the noble Lord, Lord Warner, referred, and the development of electronic medical records. I know that other amendments address that issue. We should also be able to carry out statistical analysis.
The noble Lords, Lord Willis and Lord Warner, referred to the rapid sequencing of the genome—whole-genome sequencing—that will impact on the whole of medicine. Recent rapid developments in DNA sequencing technologies have dramatically cut the cost and the time required to sequence a human genome to a point that it will soon be easier and cheaper to sequence each patient’s genome and keep it in their notes. Every time they are diagnosed with or treated for a disease, a genome will be used to extract information. By combining that with our advancing understanding of genes and diseases, whole-genome sequencing is set to change the current clinical and public health practice by enabling more accurate, sophisticated and cost-effective genome testing.
Understanding the health impact of individual genomic variance presents a considerable challenge for analysis, interpretation and management of data. Managing that data will require bioinformatics to be established. The NHS should urgently develop clinical bioinformatics expertise and infrastructure to ensure clinical technical support for medical analysis and interpretation of genomic data. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that includes informatics is crucial in identifying that. If we are to succeed in applying the results of our research to patient care, we need to establish all these issues.
I should briefly mention Amendment 74 in my name. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, mentioned research in public health, as did the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg. My amendment relates to Clause 9 on,
“Duties as to improvement of public health”,
and the functions of local authorities and the Secretary of State as to improvement of public health. The amendment merely tries to,
“establish promotional research, and acting on research evidence into the causes of ill health”.
It is important that local authorities recognise that public health directors should be involved in research in the agenda that is being developed in the prevention of disease. Those are my brief comments.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
My Lords, I was really pleased to see Clause 5 extend the duties of the Secretary of State with regard to research and its use. Clause 5 is a necessary acknowledgement of the extremely important role of medical and scientific research in ensuring that we deliver high-quality healthcare. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, and other noble Lords have spelt out graphically the dependence of improvements in treatments on research.
In his response to questions raised at Second Reading, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, repeated the Government’s assurance that a culture of research and innovation would be embedded in the structural changes to the NHS proposed in the Bill. It is a fine promise, but I am concerned as to whether the Bill in its current form is able to deliver this in practice. The lack of detail or clarity across the Bill about the role of and commitment to research in the reformed NHS has been noted by a number of noble Lords. For this reason, Clause 5 needs to be stronger and more explicit.
Embedding research across the complex NHS system requires proactive, top-down, leadership. Clause 5, as it currently stands, does not define how the Secretary of State would provide such leadership. Acknowledging that such research needs to be promoted stops short of an active commitment to promote research, or indeed of saying what that action would look like.
Lord Rea
My Lords, I have a short question, on a subject mentioned by my noble friend Lord Turnberg and others. The National Institute for Health Research is now directly related to the Department of Health. Is it going to stay there, or is it going to be moved over, as was suggested, to the NHS Commissioning Board? Is the funding going to be assured? I do not think that we are quite sure about these things.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, I was delighted to lend my name in support of these amendments. We have had a tremendous debate, which is a sign that the Committee stage of the Bill is starting to get down to business and focus on some of the nitty-gritty, now that we have moved on from some of the more extremely high-level principles about whether or not we should see Clauses 1 and 4 in the Bill.
I very much support the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Willis. He is chair of the Association of Medical Research Charities. I declare an interest myself as chief executive of a medical research charity, Breast Cancer Campaign. We are members of the noble Lord’s association, and are very grateful to him for the leadership that he gives.
There are very few points I want to add to the debate, as it has already been very comprehensive. In thinking about this, I want to stress how incredibly important it is that we understand the role of research in the NHS as a driver for quality and improving outcomes for patients. Only today at the AMRC AGM, I heard someone describing research as one of the three pillars, alongside service delivery and education, and stressing the role that research plays in driving up quality and outcomes for patients.
We know that this is something that is not lost on the public. We have already heard what importance the public place on research delivery in the NHS—93 per cent of people asked by the AMRC in a MORI poll said that they wanted their local NHS to be encouraged or required to deliver research locally. That is an enormous vote of confidence in research in the NHS.
The public do not just say this in answer to surveys. They vote for research through their wallets, as we have already heard from a number of noble Lords. Medical research charities contribute £1 billion to research in this country. That is an enormous achievement.
The contribution that the NHS makes to medical research worldwide is very special indeed. It is quite simply a no-brainer that research has consistently delivered real progress for patients. I believe it is agreed that the NHS has a special and unique role to play, which is unparalleled in the world. We have already agreed around the House that in this country we punch above our weight, as the noble Lord, Lord Walton, said. As the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, said very eloquently, we know that the UK generates over 10 per cent of the world’s clinical science and health research outputs and has created nearly a quarter of the world’s top 100 medicines. That is a great achievement. Now that the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, is back in his place, I can remind the House that in the earlier debate he commented on how life expectancy continues to rise, following on from the success of medical research.
As I said at Second Reading, there are many examples where the special nature of the NHS has contributed to progress. I mentioned particularly the million women study, supported by Cancer Research UK in partnership with the NHS, a collaboration that revealed the role of hormone replacement therapy in breast cancer risk—an enormous study, made possible by the NHS. I also talked about a project that my own charity is involved in. It is a real challenge. Noble Lords have already made many points about the difficulty in establishing informatics systems. We are working to establish a tissue bank, to look at breast cancer specifically, and to drive forward the vital role that genomics plays. This is also made possible by the NHS. There are many examples, as I have said.
I welcome this duty. It is the first time we have seen a duty of this nature on the Secretary of State, and it is a very important step forward, but if the duty is going to be meaningful we need to know—so I would like to hear from the Minister—what the Government will see as success in executing that duty. I want to understand what success will look like—what will be the benchmarks that the Secretary of State will use to know whether his duty has been executed successfully.
Will we continue to evaluate the contribution that NHS research makes to GDP? How will the NHS research duty play in to the research assessment exercise that is undertaken in higher education? Could that be used to show how effective partnerships work in the NHS, because it is often those partnerships between NHS trust and academic institutions which are so important? What could Monitor or the Care Quality Commission do to help us understand the contribution that research has made to improving outcomes in various settings? Will we have an impact rating for NHS foundation trusts relating to their promotion of R&D? Will we be considering the number of patients in clinical trials as a measure—that is something that many people are worried about at the moment? Should we be looking at the number of clinical fellows or clinical professors in surgery?
What will success look like for the Secretary of State? I have heard talk that a research tariff is being developed; that has been referred to in correspondence. I would be grateful if the noble Earl could explain whether it is and what the consultation process might be. There has been a suggestion that a diagram or an organigram might help us here when looking at how the funding streams might work. We had a meeting with Dame Sally Davies when that was on the agenda. We have been reassured that funding will work in the same way as in the past. I am not sure whether it can, so I should be grateful if the Minister could reassure us on how that would work and perhaps produce a diagram for us.
Baroness Emerton
My Lords, I have appreciated all the contributions on the amendments on research. There is just one thing that I take issue with: the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, who said that his profession was the Cinderella of research. Other professions would describe themselves as being Cinderellas in terms of research funding. Obviously, I speak for nursing and midwifery, but also for the other healthcare professions, which are all graduate professions and which are concerned to give evidence-based practice wherever they are in the NHS. Perhaps the noble Earl could re-emphasise that it will be multiprofessional research. All the contributions this evening have been on medicine and scientific research, but the other professions can contribute an enormous amount. Nursing is very reliant on charitable, voluntary funds for its research and has done some tremendous research exercises in clinical procedures, as have the other professions—midwives and physiotherapists. Will the noble Earl consider this being a multiprofessional research board?
Lord Darzi of Denham
My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 42. I declare an obvious conflict: I am a recipient of funding from the National Institute of Health Research; I am also a senior fellow in the NIHR.
We should all be very proud that huge investment has gone into research in the NHS. The reforms of the past decade have been significant. We have been used as the exemplar across the globe not just on funding but on the structure and the processes, driving research within the NHS.
I should like to cover not just the health gains but the economic gains of research. Whichever way we look at it, the life science industry is worth about 4.3 per cent of our GDP. That is a significant contribution. The life science industry employs between 170,000 and 180,000 people. We are still very attractive to the pharmaceutical companies, which come here because some of the best brains are coming out of our universities. We need to work on making the NHS as attractive as the university sector. That is why safeguarding of funding within the National Institute of Health Research is vital for that important mission if we are to contribute to future economic growth.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
In intervening in this interesting debate, I shall be very brief. I simply want the Minister to explain where the levers will be in the commissioning decisions to make sure that the principle of research that is being embedded across all the professions happens, given the multiplicity of providers and, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, clearly outlined, the relative paucity of research in primary care but an increased push for more people to be cared for in the community across all the disciplines involved. A simple example of that is the problem that we now have with antibiotic resistance. There is potential overprescribing, but much of that prescribing is going on in primary care in the management of relatively simple conditions. If those are not researched into, we miss a fantastically important opportunity.
Lord Kakkar
My Lords, I support many of the amendments in the group. I do so as a biomedical research and clinical academic, therefore benefiting from many of the opportunities that the current systems for biomedical research in the National Health Service provide.
I start by congratulating Her Majesty's Government on having included for the Secretary of State for the first time in a health Bill responsibilities to promoting research. That is hugely important, because it allows us to secure what has been achieved to date in structures and funding going forward in the National Health Service.
There are, of course, anxieties, which we have heard in this important debate, which need to be addressed. Can the noble Earl provide clarification in three areas, notwithstanding the fact that the Bill already emphasises the responsibilities of the Secretary of State for Health? First, how is it is envisaged that the funding for biomedical research will be protected when that fund moves to the NHS Commissioning Board? Secondly, how will the clinical commissioning groups be responsible for promoting research in future, how will that be supervised by the NHS Commissioning Board, and will any form of instruction or performance measure be included in the supervision that the Commissioning Board provides for clinical commissioning groups?
Finally, how, within the proposed structure of the Commissioning Board, will there be encouragement and support for academic health science centres, as they currently exist, and in the future, potentially, academic health partnerships? They provide the opportunity both to drive forward opportunities for biomedical research to improve healthcare and the health gain for our population, and to drive forward the economic opportunities that attend the biomedical sciences industry in our country. However, they also drive forward opportunities for a broader population health gain through a focus on the tripartite mission of improved clinical care, education, training and research.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate, and I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, and other noble Lords who have spoken in it very persuasively about the importance of research.
At heart, there are three particular questions that we put to the noble Earl, Lord Howe. First, how is funding for research to be protected? Secondly, how are we to ensure that strong leadership will be given from the centre? The third is the question of levers. What levers are there in this system to ensure that research is given a prominent place?
First, there can be no doubt whatsoever, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, of the direct link between research and the quality of patient care. That must be at the forefront of our consideration. Secondly, he is also right about public health. Research into public health, evidence and epidemiology is vital if we are to improve the overall health of people living in this country. Thirdly, we have the contribution that research makes to UK plc, and specifically the contribution of the pharmaceutical industry.
When I chaired the competitive taskforce with the industry some years ago, we found that out of the 100 most important branded medicines at the time, 30 had been developed in the UK. Although the UK share of global spend on pharmaceuticals was about 2 per cent, our R&D contribution, including that of the industry, was about 10 per cent. I suspect that those figures have slipped a little since that report, but there is no question that the pharmaceutical industry in particular makes a huge contribution to our economy. We cannot be complacent about that in the future.
On the question of leadership, I was fortunate to be present at the recent annual conference of the NHS Confederation. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, that, “They would say that, wouldn’t they”, when it comes to this rather foolish idea that somehow if you just leave it to them everything will be all right, but I recall a speech made by Dame Sally Davies in which she talked about the importance of research. She argued that the NHS itself has to make a greater contribution to research. This was not about funding; this was about NHS organisations recognising that research was important. It was a brilliant speech. It is essential that we continue to have that kind of national leadership in research funding.
There is a big question about what exactly the duty of the Secretary of State will be with regard to research if we end up with a highly devolved structure in which the levers left to the Secretary of State will clearly be limited. It is clear that the day-to-day concerns of most people in the NHS are going to be diverted into a market-orientated culture, where, frankly, the kind of collaboration that research requires across NHS organisations may well be regarded as collusive behaviour by economic regulators and the competition authorities.
I speak with some experience of economic regulation. Ofgem was the last economic regulator with which I had regular dealings as Minister for Energy. What struck me was that regulators’ concerns are much more about day-to-day issues than they are about the long-term viability of a particular industry. We found, with Ofgem, that we had to change the law to make sure that it had some regard to future customers rather than simply being concerned about the actual price of energy to the customers of today. If we have regulators whose main concern is about driving day-to-day competition, I wonder where issues of research come into play.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Yes my Lords, but so was the overriding duty of Ofgem to the customer. The problem is how a regulator defines that responsibility. Since the Government are intent on this very foolish drive into competition, I believe that the risk is that the regulator will also be driven into thinking that that is its most important aim.
There are some real questions here, which I put to the noble Earl, about ensuring that there is sufficient concern, investment and leadership on the question of research. I would also ask the noble Earl how we protect and ring-fence the research budget. I ask him to think of the national Commissioning Board, faced with a hard winter, huge public concern and political pressure about funding, and the temptation to dip into the research budget. We all know that that happens. My noble friend Lord Warner and I were debating earlier who was responsible when there was real pressure on the training commissions. I thought it was my noble friend, actually, but we can continue to debate that.
Lord Warner
My Lords, things went downhill when I left at the end of December 2006.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, with the greatest respect, I will not go into who left me the junior hospital doctors issue. He will recall that my first day as a Minister was actually the first day of Committee on the glorious Mental Health Bill, and that was a blessed memory, I must say.
My experience was that the health service let us down on training commissions, because at the time they were facing a financial difficulty and it was all too easy to cut those commissions. The result was that Ministers essentially took it upon themselves to put central controls back into the system. My concern is that if the NCB simply has research in its budgetary responsibility and there are severe pressures, it is just too easy to dip into it. The problem is also, as my noble friend Lord Warner said, that, as we know, sometimes research budgets take a little time to kick in, but once you do it you are funding for three, five, seven years. Again, in each financial year, an amount is probably available in the winter that had not been spent. The problem is that you will never get that resource back again.
The second point that I would like to put to the noble Earl is about clinical commissioning groups. How do we ensure that their commissioning decisions support research? My noble friend Lord Turnberg said that research is no cottage industry, but clinical commissioning groups are the epitome of a cottage industry. He also referred to the fact that GPs have little history of undertaking research and commitment to it. Yet we are handing them billions and billions of pounds, quite remarkably, on the basis of no evidence whatever that I can see that they are fitted to discharge that responsibility. I ask the noble Earl where we can have assurance that clinical commissioning groups will be prepared to invest in services where there is a strong research base.
The third challenge is to NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts. The noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, put his hand on it when he talked about the reduction in the number of clinical academic posts. I believe that NHS trusts have a great role to play in encouraging their clinicians and in encouraging joint posts with universities. Again, I worry that the focus on job plans and the productivity of clinicians will discourage research because the emphasis will be on patient throughput. How are we going to ensure that that does not happen?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I agree that this has been an absolutely excellent debate and I have listened very carefully to all the contributions.
Clause 5 places a duty on the Secretary of State, for the first time, to have regard to the need to promote research within the health service. It also places equivalent duties on the Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups. The duty applies to research into matters relevant to the health service—I shall come on to that phrase later—and the use within the health service of evidence obtained from research.
I turn straight away to the amendments, beginning with Amendments 39 and 199ZA together, as they make the same changes to the research duties on the Secretary of State and clinical commissioning groups. Amendment 39, tabled by my noble friend Lord Willis and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, would require the Secretary of State to promote research within the health service and to promote the use of the evidence obtained from that research. The Bill as drafted requires the Secretary of State to have regard to the need to promote research in the health service. This means that the Secretary of State must bear in mind the importance of research when exercising any of his functions and consider how the exercise of those functions might in itself promote research or how it might influence the promotion of research by others. I have reflected on these two amendments and I can tell noble Lords that I sympathise with the arguments behind them. Of course, I fully recognise the importance of ensuring that research is promoted within the health service. Therefore, I now give a commitment, following this debate, to undertake a closer consideration of this duty.
Amendment 40, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Patel, requires the Secretary of State to have regard to the need to develop research findings for clinical application in the health service. I agree with the noble Lords that this emphasis is important. We need to ensure that, wherever possible, research outcomes are translated into clinical practice. This is how the health service moves forward. The noble Lord, Lord Walton, as so often, was completely right in all that he said on that subject. As the duty is currently drafted, the Secretary of State is already required to have regard to the need to promote the use of evidence obtained from research. Therefore, we believe that this amendment would duplicate the existing duty.
Amendment 40 also refers to the need to ensure that staff have the relevant training and support where new technologies are introduced. We have brought forward an amendment to introduce a duty on the Secretary of State to exercise his functions so as to secure an effective system for education and training within the health service. The word “effective” is there for a purpose. Similarly, the NHS constitution makes a public pledge that all NHS providers should provide all their staff with access to appropriate training for their jobs, together with line management support to succeed. Therefore, again, in my view this amendment is unnecessary.
It may also help to reassure noble Lords if I refer to our consultation document, An Information Revolution. In this, we state that information management and IT capability are essential if we are to achieve improved healthcare outcomes. Our forthcoming information strategy will recognise the importance of informatics skills within the health service, and I hope that this will reassure noble Lords—in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Warner—that we are fully aware of the need to ensure that staff are able to maximise the benefits that new technologies can offer.
I now turn to Amendment 41, also tabled by my noble friend Lord Willis and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. This amendment would place an additional requirement on the Secretary of State to promote research into public health issues. Again, I agree with the principle behind the amendment—it is indeed true that advances in public health are shaped by research and evidence, and the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, gave us a number of examples. In fact, this amendment can be dealt with quite simply. The duty on the Secretary of State, the board and clinical commissioning groups to have regard to the need to promote research applies to “the health service”. That phrase encompasses both the NHS and public health services, and therefore the duties already apply to public health.
There are other clauses in the Bill that focus specifically on research into health protection. Clause 8 lists research and other steps,
“for advancing knowledge and understanding”,
as examples of action that the Secretary of State may take under his wider duty in relation to protecting public health. Clause 14(13) expressly gives the Secretary of State, the NHS and local authorities the power to commission or assist research.
My noble friend Lord Willis asked me how the duty on the Secretary of State would be fulfilled in practice. It may be helpful if I briefly set out the work that is going on beyond the Bill to ensure that research is embedded in the new system. The department has recently published a document setting out initial proposals for the NHS Commissioning Board. Among other things, it emphasises that, to fulfil its purpose, the board should support,
“a culture which promotes research and innovation”.
There is also a clear indication in the department’s document, Developing Clinical Commissioning Groups: Towards Authorisation, that clinical commissioning groups will be expected to demonstrate how they will promote research. These documents can be found on the Department of Health’s website. I should be very happy to expand on this in a letter to my noble friend and other noble Lords.
In this area the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, asked what the levers for research would be, and that question was echoed by a number of other noble Lords. I will expand on this in writing, but there are a number of parallel levers across government that will do this, ensuring that the UK’s commercial and industrial landscape is, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, rightly emphasised, an attractive place to do research, and that we do not neglect any aspect of research—basic, translational and clinical—so it is about research across the piece. It is also about the pricing of medicines, about our skills base as a country and about encouraging the concept of clustering, linking universities and the NHS and industry. We have announced recently a large sum of money which will go towards biomedical research clusters and units. It is also about deregulation, streamlining research and creating the Health Research Authority to do that, the drivers in the NHS such as the tariff and, not least, holding bodies in the NHS—CCGs no less than others—accountable for the duties that are in this Bill. Accountability is the counterpart to the concept of autonomy.
I cannot say much to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, about the tariff. We do not envisage a separate tariff for research, but we will ensure that the systems and processes that the board and CCGs use for commissioning patient care ensure that research is supported and that treatment costs are funded by the NHS. This will specifically include a tariff. It is essential that the tariff for patient care incorporates the costs of patients who are taking part in research, and we will ensure that it does.
I turn to Amendment 42, which was tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Patel, and my noble friend Lord Ribeiro. This amendment seeks to safeguard the funding of research by placing a requirement on the Secretary of State to ensure that there is adequate funding for research and the application of that research to the health service. The amendment also aims to ensure that clinical commissioning groups will fund the treatment of patients involved in research. I share the desire to protect research funding—as Minister for research, how could I not do so? My noble friend Lord Willis need have no fears about our intent in this area. The Government have signalled their clear and strong support for research by increasing the research budget of the Department of Health in real terms over the current spending review period.
I heard from many noble Lords the concern about the research responsibility for the NIHR transferring across to the NHS Commissioning Board and how the budget could be protected in that event. I do not know where this idea has come from, but it is not accurate. The budget for the National Institute for Health Research is centrally held within the Department of Health and will remain so. The budget for research commissioning will not transfer to the NHS Commissioning Board. Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, retains a responsibility for the National Institute for Health Research and for the budget that is allocated to it to commission research. I hope that that reassures my noble friend and the noble Lords, Lord Walton, Lord Warner, Lord Turnberg and Lord Rea, and all others who have expressed worries on that score.
With respect to the research that takes place within the health service, alongside the Secretary of State’s duty to have regard to the need to promote research, Clause 14(13) already gives him the powers to commission research or assist any person conducting research, including by providing financial assistance. An equivalent duty and powers are conferred on the board and clinical commissioning groups. We therefore believe that there are robust arrangements for safeguarding the funding of research already in place.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
I should apologise to the noble Earl. The amendment was put down to probe the issues.
Earl Howe
I am most grateful to the noble Lord. In that case I shall not dwell on it at great length.
Amendment 40A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, and other noble Lords, would require the Secretary of State to have regard to the need to promote the use of information derived from patients for research purposes while taking full account of the confidentiality of information. I welcome the intent behind this amendment, but it is in fact unnecessary. We recognise the important role that patient data, if treated carefully and confidentially—and that I hope goes without saying—can play in improving the quality of health research. I spoke earlier about our consultation document An Information Revolution, in which we propose that the most important source of data is the patient’s or the service user’s care record generated at the point of care. Information in these records also provides much of the data needed for other secondary purposes: for commissioners, for managers, for care professionals and, importantly, for research. We are using the responses that we received to the consultation, together with the findings of the NHS Future Forum, to develop an information strategy for health and social care in England. This will highlight how increased transparency and greater access to information supports improvements in care and research. It is the major work stream. I can reassure the noble Lord that we value the use of patient information where confidentiality is appropriately protected as a source of research and that we are looking at ways to embed its use in our information strategy.
Lord Turnberg
Can the noble Earl give us any idea of the timescale over which we might see something emerging from this? It has been on the agenda for a very long time and we really need to move on it.
Earl Howe
I hope that I am not putting my neck on the block, but within a month the noble Lord should hear news that may cheer him on this front.
A great many noble Lords have asked me questions, some of which I have covered, but I suggest that in the interests of time it might be helpful if I followed up this debate in writing and in a way that will enable me to answer the questions in greater detail than I would now in any event.
Lord Warner
My Lords, in doing that will the Minister clarify what “health service” means? As I read the Bill, it sometimes looks as though public health is not included in that definition. It would be helpful if the Minister could give us some clarity on that and point us in the direction of an authoritative definition.
Earl Howe
I should be very glad to do so. The noble Lord may not be surprised to hear that, when I was being briefed for this Bill, I had to ask myself that very same question. The definition is there, but I think that it would be helpful if I set out the import of that phrase in its fullest sense.
I hope that I have said enough to encourage noble Lords not to press their amendments, but, in doing so, I reiterate my thanks to all noble Lords who have made such an excellent contribution to this debate.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
My Lords, I thank the Minister for, as ever, a very courteous and thoughtful response to many of the issues which have been raised, in particular his response to Amendment 39 and his undertaking to reconsider “have regard to the need to”, which appears to be a little bit of clumsy draftsmanship that would be unworthy of the Minister himself.
The Minister raised a number of important issues, including that to which the noble Lord, Lord Warner, referred. We have now had a definition of “health service” which includes public health. That means that public health research could lie within some local authorities, because a significant amount of public health will be devolved to local authorities. While I was pleased to hear the Minister say today that those people moving from the National Health Service to local authorities for public health matters would retain National Health Service terms and conditions, the reality is that they will be working under a local authority aegis and that research would therefore be an issue for local authorities rather than Public Health England—or so I understand, but we will probe that later.
On protecting funding, I was particularly grateful for the way in which my noble friend the Minister responded to the idea of ring-fencing. He spoke not of ring-fencing, but said that there had been an increase in budget. It would have been good if he could have made that comment. However, he did say that NIHR would remain a stand-alone organisation. That was news to me; I thought that it was going to move into other organisations. Quite frankly, that is good news. It has a reputation which demonstrates that research is very important and we can track how it is used and when. I thank the Minister for that.
I apologise profusely to the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, for indicating that “research” meant the work that is coming out of universities and being translated for use at the bedside. She was quite right to remind us that “research” for the purposes of this Bill was all research, and that what should underpin all public policy, in the NHS or anywhere else, is research which gives you evidence to inform policy decisions. I thank her for that rebuke.
Lord Warner
I do not want to prolong this debate. I will read very carefully what the Minister said about protection of finance. We may want to come back to this issue to be reassured that all is well.
“( ) the proper conduct of research by establishing such structures and procedures as he deems necessary to prevent, detect and impose sanctions on research conduct”
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I shall be very brief. In simple terms, the Secretary of State now has a duty to promote research. Clearly, that research must have integrity, and this amendment is about protecting that integrity. I think that we all agree that medical research is crucial to the UK’s healthcare system, the economy—as the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, made clear in our previous debate—and our standing as an international research community. I make it clear to the Committee that the claim that the incidence of malpractice is widespread is wrong—there is not widespread malpractice in health research or in any part of our research base—but it would also be wrong to say that we have a perfect system and there is not some malpractice.
While peer review is an extremely robust method for assessing the quality of the science and the research, it was never intended as a mechanism to detect fraud. There is an assumption when you peer-review a piece of research that the data are accurate and that what you are doing is looking at the methodology, the evidence and the conclusions to see whether they stand up to scrutiny. You do not simply go back and look at the whole of the data.
We know that there are a number of irregular goings-on at various levels of research, particularly at junior level, from ghost-writing and guest authorship to plagiarism and falsification of data. As science, particularly medical science, relies on trust, it is important that we have a robust system in place which guarantees research integrity as far as it is possible. Andrew Wakefield, who built the case against the use of the MMR vaccine, based his evidence on a very small sample, falsified the data and manipulated patient records. It is clear that we need a system that would prevent that happening again. The reality is that it took seven years before that research was fully retracted and, to this day, the level of MMR vaccine uptake remains below the 95 per cent that we would regard as sufficient to confer immunity on the population. In other words, that incident of malpractice continues to have an effect. Children are being affected as a result and mothers in particular are worried.
The House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee recently looked at peer review in scientific publications and reported on 18 July. One of its recommendations was:
“Oversight of research integrity in the UK is in need of revision. The current situation is unsatisfactory. We are concerned that the UK does not seem to have an oversight body for research integrity that provides ‘advice and support to research employers and assurance to research funders’, across all disciplines”.
Interestingly, the Government said in response:
“The Government agrees that action on assurance of research integrity is required”.
They went on to say, quite rightly, that it was the responsibility of employers, whether they be universities, research laboratories or private organisations, to guarantee the integrity of their research. They said that they did not want there to be a new research integrity agency or an equivalent, but, instead, a “Research Integrity Concordat”, which brought together universities and bodies involved with research and which the Government would oversee.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has raised this extremely important matter. Research misconduct is rare, but it happens. Several years ago, there were a number of quite cogent reports produced by Dr Frank Wells of the British Medical Association, Dr Stephen Lock, who was the editor of the British Medical Journal and his successor, Dr Richard Smith, which actually demonstrated that in a number of rare cases research results had been fabricated. This issue has been highlighted by a number of similar events in the United States and elsewhere. The universities, the research councils and a number of other bodies have looked at this matter and made a number of recommendations. I am not at all certain that this is the right place in this Bill for this issue to be raised, but the question needs further consideration by the Government—for instance, to decide whether this important issue should be in any way part of the remit of the proposed new medical research agency.
Baroness Thornton
The noble Lord raised a very interesting and important point, but I do not intend to delay the House by expanding on it.
Earl Howe
My Lords, Amendment 41A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Willis, will require the Secretary of State to set up a system to ensure that research is conducted properly and ethically and that there are sanctions in place in cases of misconduct. Let me say straight away that I am in agreement with the intention of my noble friend in tabling this amendment; the proper conduct of research is very important, just as proper conduct is critical in clinical practice. All my noble friend’s comments on that theme were extremely pertinent.
Looking at the amendment as it is worded, I can assure my noble friend that there are already systems in place to ensure that research is conducted ethically. Research, as he knows, cannot proceed without ethics committee approval. I realise that this is a probing amendment, but equally, as it is worded, it overlooks an important element in the current system of accountability, because it would risk undermining the clear responsibility in research, as in clinical practice, that employers have for the conduct of their employees and that professional councils have in regulating their members. Both can impose sanctions on researchers if their conduct is found to be inappropriate. I do not see that it is the responsibility of the Secretary of State to impose sanctions on clinical professionals, and it should not be his responsibility to do so for researchers. In the future, the Health Research Authority will continue the good work of the National Research Ethics Service, working with others to prevent misconduct by ensuring that the ethics of research have independently reviewed by research ethics committees.
This evening, I am able to give a new commitment to my noble friend. I am happy to tell him that we intend to publish the draft clauses on research for pre-legislative scrutiny in the second Session of this Parliament. That scrutiny will enable my noble friend and other noble Lords to comment on the detail of our proposals for the Health Research Authority and, in turn, enable us to ensure that future legislation is fit for purpose. I hope my noble friend will welcome that pledge.
If I may, I will cover the question my noble friend asked me about the concordat in a letter to him following this debate. I hope I have reassured him that there are systems in place to ensure good conduct in research. Nevertheless, his points are well made and I shall reflect fully upon them. I can only say at the moment that the Health Research Authority intends to build on these systems. In the light of what I said, I hope my noble friend will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for that response. In view of it, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“The Secretary of State’s duty as to education and training
After section 1D of the National Health Service Act 2006 insert— “1E Duty as to education and training
(1) The Secretary of State must exercise the functions of the Secretary of State under any relevant enactment so as to secure that there is an effective system for the planning and delivery of education and training to persons who are employed, or who are considering becoming employed, in an activity which involves or is connected with the provision of services as part of the health service in England.
(2) In subsection (1), “relevant enactment” means section 63 of the Health Services and Public Health Act 1968 and any other enactment under which the Secretary of State has functions which could be exercised for the purpose of securing that there is such an effective system as is mentioned in that subsection.””
Baroness Wheeler
“The Secretary of State’s duty as to national workforce structures
After section 1D of the National Health Service Act 2006, insert—“1E Secretary of State’s duty as to national workforce structures
The Secretary of State has a duty to maintain a national pay and bargaining system for healthcare staff, to cover those staff providing NHS services and services for the improvement of public health.””
Baroness Wheeler
My Lords, I am pleased to move this important amendment, supported by my noble friends Lady Thornton and Lord Hunt. The amendment would provide some much needed morale and security at a time of great upheaval for NHS staff. In turn, it would reassure patients that the morale of those treating or caring for them will not impact on the quality of care they receive. Let us just imagine how NHS staff must be feeling now, no matter how dedicated or determined they are to carry on providing the best care possible. There is the Nicholson challenge to implement £20 billion-worth of savings, which they know will seriously impact on patient care, they are facing huge disruption to services and patient care as primary care trusts and strategic health authorities are abolished under the enormous upheaval of reorganisation, and there is massive uncertainty about the future bargaining arrangements for their pay and conditions.
The amendment calls on the Government to commit to the continuation of national determination of pay and national collective bargaining for terms and conditions for NHS staff under the reorganised NHS, leaving employers and trade unions nationally to agree what local flexibilities should operate. The Government have so far failed to acknowledge the need to retain national workforce structures for terms and conditions, pay and bargaining. The Bill prescribes nothing on the pay systems that clinical commissioning groups should adopt, giving them greater leeway to break away from the existing long-established and well-tested pay systems for NHS staff.
Agenda for Change is the single, national pay system in operation for the NHS and applies directly to all staff, excluding doctors, dentists and some very senior managers. It is well established, much respected by employers and staff and delivers equality-proof pay and grading schemes. However, the Liberating the NHS White Paper threatened the viability of a stable, national collective agreement, potentially undermining the NHS pay review body, which makes recommendations on the remuneration of all staff paid under Agenda for Change and employed in the NHS. The current Bill applies only to England, but the implications for national pay determination across the UK are significant.
We know that most staff do not work in the NHS to get rich, despite the constant, distorted picture in some parts of the media about the levels of public sector pay and pensions. Nurses’ pay starts from £21,000 a year and healthcare assistants from as little as £14,000 a year. The average public service pension is around £7,800 a year, but the average pension for a woman working in the NHS is only around £3,500 a year. If staff do not work for the NHS to get rich, what do they value? Job security is no longer the public sector staple employment motivator that it was: 13,000 redundancies have resulted from the current reorganisation. A recent survey by the Royal College of Nursing showed that an estimated 15,000 nurses and healthcare assistants expect to be made redundant in the next 12 months. Staff are not able to value job security any longer, but they do value fairness. Agenda for Change has delivered that, as well as equal pay.
In the uncertain environment caused by the reforms, having some guarantee about access to a fair, national pay system would at least provide an element of security. If, in the future, foundation trusts, with the heavy financial pressures they will face, start to abandon established pay rates and conditions, we fear that this will lead to the rapid downward spiralling of pay for staff, which will be particularly hard in these economic times. Staff morale and motivation are already suffering, and local pay bargaining would make it harder for the NHS to recruit and retain the best available staff, so in turn affecting patient service. Undermining staff pay and moving to local pay bargaining would also have a detrimental impact on patients. We must have an equitable spread of doctors, nurses and other professionals across the country. If local pay bargaining leads to many health staff moving away from a particular area, we could see the quality of service reduced there or patients having to wait longer because vacancies have not been filled. Agenda for Change is generally considered across the NHS to be a vast improvement on the previous fragmented and complex arrangements. It is seen as providing a firm basis for taking forward important, substantive issues, particularly equal pay, new ways of working and workforce reprofiling.
The amendment also explicitly refers to public health staff, because this is one of the major concerns for the NHS public health workforce, who continue to operate in limbo, unsure of exactly who will be employing them and on what pay, terms and conditions. The Government have promised a detailed public health workforce strategy in the autumn to support effective transition to the new system. When is the strategy to be published and what will be the consultation arrangements for all stakeholders? All we know now is that the directors of public health will transfer to local authorities, but precious little else is known yet about the arrangements for the remaining public health workforce, a factor highlighted by the House of Commons Health Committee last week. The committee stressed that,
“uncertainty has inevitably been created by the transition to new structures; this is undermining morale and causing people with valuable skills to leave the profession. Uncertainty around staffing issues must be resolved as quickly as possible. It is also important that the public health specialty is fully integrated into the Government's forthcoming proposals for healthcare workforce planning, education and training”.
The amendment would give the Government a chance to provide some much needed solace for public health staff by committing that they should be covered by the same pay system as other health workers. It would also give hope and reassurance to all NHS staff about their future pay bargaining arrangements. I urge the Minister to respond positively.
Lord MacKenzie of Culkein
My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 45 and to follow on from my noble friend Lady Wheeler. I have spent quite a lot of my working life negotiating pay and conditions for staff in the National Health Service. I sat on four NHS Whitley councils for a very long time—one of them for 21 years. As a nurse, I was privileged to lead negotiations on behalf of Britain’s nurses and midwives for quite a few years as chairman of the staff side of the Nursing and Midwifery Staffs Negotiating Council. So I know a little about the subject of this amendment and the possible consequences of any breakdown in national pay and conditions of service for National Health Service staff.
We have had nationally agreed pay and conditions ever since the inception of the National Health Service, with occasional attempts to break this down, particularly in the late 1980s. The Government of the day thought better of it and backed away. The old Whitley system stood the National Health Service in good stead for many years, but it was far from perfect and there was not always peace and harmony. There were problems in some years, going back, for example, to 1972 for ancillary staff, 1974 particularly for nurses and 1982 for most staff groups. The most recent that lingers in my memory was the ambulance dispute, which I think was in 1990.
Not all staff unions in 1983 agreed that the Government should set up a pay review body for nurses and midwives and professions allied to medicine. However, it was in my view an entirely sensible move, which by and large took a lot of heat out of relations between management and staff organisations for these two groups of staff. Why was the pay review body the right solution? The review body was independent and the staff unions were forced to undertake very detailed research into their pay claims. We used to spend many months getting that evidence right. The management side and government put in evidence as well. The Office of Manpower Economics, which provides the secretariat to the review body to this day, also carried out its own research. The review body took oral evidence from all of the parties. I led that for a number of years on behalf of the staff side. The members of the review body—academics and professionals—put us through the hoops, and any half-baked evidence would have been very quickly exposed. There was no question of any staff side taking inflation, doubling it and—metaphorically at least—banging the table. That clearly would not work.
Baroness Murphy
My Lords, by now it will be no surprise to the Opposition that I do not support this amendment. It seems to be an extraordinary pedalling-backwards amendment. I ought to remind colleagues that foundation trusts already have the ability to negotiate local terms and conditions of service, so at least two-thirds of mental health trusts and half of all acute trusts already have it. They have not used those freedoms for very sound reasons, but there will come a time when gradually they will want to do so. It seems extraordinary that we would seek to remove those freedoms. I say to those who are anxious about pushing pay downwards that that has not happened at all with consultant grades of pay, where freedoms have led to much greater flexibility and a real and genuine recognition of the rarity of some consultant specialties in some areas, so it is not a good idea to remove that pay bargaining and that flexibility locally.
I do not see the Agenda for Change as being successful. Yes, it was better than the Whitley Council, which had 250 different scales and you did not know where you were; it was pretty grim. However, Agenda for Change has not been implemented with the learning and skills framework alongside in any more than 50 per cent of trusts. It has not led to productivity gains. It led to an uplift of pay but did not actually deliver what employers wanted it to deliver.
In my view, a good employment framework for local organisations must take account of local economic circumstances, the social demographic mix and the skills available in the local communities. Therefore, it must give local employers greater flexibility, as part of the autonomy of those organisations, and the ability to move away gradually from the situation that we have at the moment of profound skill shortages of nurses in some areas and an oversupply of some skills in other areas. If we could be more sensitive to local circumstances, we would get better values and rewards for staff in the NHS. I therefore very much support the Government’s approach to this and do not support this amendment.
Lord Rooker
My Lords, I intervene briefly in this debate. It also gives me the opportunity to apologise to the House. I removed Amendments 35 and 36 at 10 pm on Monday because I could not guarantee to be here at 3.30 pm today. I apologise if it caused confusion, but I could not be here today at that time.
On Amendment 45, I would like to know the Government’s position, because the noble Baroness said that the Government maintain their position. In some ways, the temptation for fragmentation is enormous. I am not sure whether the NHS is still the largest employer in Europe. As a totality, I think it probably is. However, we are talking here about England—or are we? The issue of devolution is crucial. I served for 12 months as a direct rule Minister in Northern Ireland, and I came across problems there relating to people doing the same job here. Also, of course, moving around Whitehall, as the Minister probably discovered himself, you go into departments and meet people doing more or less exactly the same job on vastly different salaries. The temptation of fragmentation was accepted at the centre of government, and that has led to significant problems of mobility for people moving even around Whitehall.
I am no expert on the NHS—I only know it as a patient and a family member of patients—but as far as I am concerned, it is a team effort. It is a bit like the argument we had with the firefighters. You are sending people out on a team to do a job, and they are not going out on different rates of pay, different pensions and different contracts. The one way to keep it cohesive is to maintain national pay bargaining. It does not mean that one size fits all, but the fact is, as my noble friend who kicked this off said, the industrial relations implications are enormous, given the potential for disputes that nobody wants. A dispute is created because of a festering sore on something else. The facility is not there if you have a system of national pay bargaining for healthcare staff.
The amendment refers to,
“services for the improvement of public health”.
Quite clearly, there will be transfers of public health staff who are working in local government and who are perhaps working to and with NHS rates of pay. That in itself will be a difficulty if people are going to work with colleagues in local government under a different scheme. While the Government take account of that, the temptation will be to level down to local government to get one size fits all at the local level. I do not think that that temptation ought to be accepted.
As for the issue of regional break-up, there was an argument about this many years ago when there was an attempt to pay teachers more who were prepared to go and work in the inner cities. You can have a local premium, and you can do some local work where there are factors, but in the case of nursing staff, particularly the lower-paid, and their ability to move around the country for career opportunities and to move their family, they are working within one service. Everybody knows that it is the NHS—the “N” is still there—but they are faced with the issue that, for the same job in the next region or the next but one region, they may be paid up to 10 per cent less and their pension and terms and conditions may be different. That could cause enormous problems.
I only spoke in the mental health debate last week, but the overall theme of the Bill and the many allegations that have been sent to noble Lords, of which the Minister will be aware, are that this is a grand plan—not now, but in the end—to fragment and break up the National Health Service, a plot hatched in the 1980s by Members of the other House who are currently members of the Government. The introduction of market forces into both the provision of care and other providers, and the temptation then to break up national pay bargaining to fit the new regime, which is supposed to be patient-oriented, is an enormous pressure on the Government. Ministers will be told that this will make sense at the local level. It may be asking a lot for the Minister to give a definitive response to this tonight, but the issues of industrial relations and pay bargaining in the NHS have to be settled well before the passage of this Bill, if only because during the period of implementation we do not, as my noble friend said, want discord among the staff as they implement what will be, I accept, many positive changes in the Bill.
The other issue that has to be raised, because we are talking about services to patients, is the pay and bargaining within service providers as the issue gets broken up. There will be some debates about charities, the third sector and social enterprise involvement where industrial relations and pay bargaining may be affected. However, there are other issues relating to the private sector doing jobs using NHS staff. It offers mobility as teams move. People do not have one place of work but may move between two or three different establishments, one of which may be the NHS, in which they may be based. They are expected to perform as part of the team locally, providing the services to patients in the round. What happens to pay bargaining in those situations?
If we allow fragmentation at a local level, it would be wise for the Minister to say that the status quo will be maintained. I accept that the status quo has flexibility built in, as the noble Baroness said, but it is a flexibility that does not appear to have been used. This is a bit like the Scottish Government. They had the flexibility to put up income tax by 5 per cent, but it has never been done. This is the reality. You put in that flexibility but for various reasons there are barriers to actually using it. In this case, the evidence is that the flexibility has not been used except perhaps in extreme circumstances. I do not think that it would be a good idea if we went down this route. I think there is enough evidence to keep people working together as a team with a national perspective that allows job mobility and promotion without people being afraid of moving within the same service because of the pay and conditions. I do not think that it is a good idea, and I hope the Minister will be able to take a more positive approach to this issue, even if he can only state it in general terms.
Earl Howe
My Lords, Amendment 45, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, seeks to impose on the Secretary of State,
“a duty to maintain a national pay and bargaining system for healthcare staff, to cover those staff providing”,
both NHS and public health services. This would cover not only existing NHS organisations but any organisation providing services to the NHS. The amendment, as worded, goes against the Government’s view that employers are best placed to determine the most appropriate pay and reward package to ensure that they recruit and retain the workforce that they need.
Our clear view is that it would be inappropriate to require independent and voluntary sector providers to adhere to NHS pay when NHS foundation trusts, as the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, rightly pointed out, already have such freedoms. The Government believe that to deliver the best care for patients, this freedom should be extended to all NHS organisations. I also take the noble Baroness’s point that while foundation trusts have the power to apply local terms and conditions for all staff, medical, clinical and administrative, very few trusts exercise those freedoms. There are around 400 trusts, and only one foundation trust—Southend—has departed from Agenda for Change, and the differences that it has negotiated are marginal.
Lord Rooker
For the public health directors, who will be the employer? Will it be the local authority? In the sense that you can pay a director of education or children’s services market rates around local government, will that be the same for the directors of public health, so that their salaries vary around the country? It would be the beginnings of a new service, in that sense. Do we know the answer to that?
Earl Howe
They will be employed by local authorities. It is too soon to say to the noble Lord what the pay grade of those people will be, but clearly they will be very senior officers within the local authority. Yes, strictly speaking, if there is freedom to set pay locally, there could be some variations around the country, but I would envisage that the pay grade of directors of public health will gravitate towards a certain figure, whatever that may be.
Lord MacKenzie of Culkein
The Minister spoke about the value of the pay review body being independent, but I was not clear whether he saw a future for that body. Could he clarify that first?
Earl Howe
My Lords, we value the pay review bodies, and there are no plans to disturb them at the moment. I sought to indicate that we continue to look at how pay arrangements are best structured. The pay review bodies do an extremely valuable job at present, as they have done for many years.
Baroness Wheeler
My Lords, I thank the Minister and other noble Lords who contributed to the debate, particularly my noble friend Lord MacKenzie for his reminder to us of the history of the establishment of the pay review bodies and the contribution that they have made, particularly to improving pay and industrial relations in the NHS.
I also thank my noble friend Lord Rooker for a number of comments that he made in support of the amendment, particularly the point that he made about operating the same job in a nearby locality for different pay and conditions, which would be likely to cause serious detriment to industrial relations. We are very concerned about that.
I deeply disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. This is not a pedalling-back amendment. The foundation trusts, I would contend, have not implemented local pay bargaining because they know the implications for industrial relations and local employment rates and so on. Agenda for Change has introduced equal pay, as the Minister said, and provided a good framework for addressing issues of equal pay for equal value. It has certainly proved its worth.
I regret that the Minister is unable to offer any real comfort to those in the House who believe that honouring the long-standing pay and bargaining arrangements for NHS staff at national level is not only the fairest thing to do but the wisest course if we are to ensure that NHS staff morale does not plummet even further. It is an important issue and I give notice that I intend to raise this matter at a later stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Energy: Wind Farms
Lord Thomas of Gresford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of current and proposed wind farms and their supporting infrastructures on the communities and landscape of mid-Wales and Shropshire.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, I welcome and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, on her first venture to the Dispatch Box. It is a pleasure to see her responding to this debate. I declare an interest as a former president of the Montgomeryshire Society with strong links to the Vrynwy and Meifod valleys. Together with my noble friend Lord Hooson I was engaged in resisting successfully the proposals to drown the Dulas valley near Llanidloes in the early 1970s to provide a regulating reservoir for Birmingham.
Two or three years ago my noble friend Lady Walmsley—my wife—and I visited a school in Llanfair Caereinion to present prizes given by the Montgomeryshire Society. While we were congratulating a bright young boy on the excellent prize he had won, I asked him, “What are your plans when you leave school?”. He said he wanted to be a farmer. I asked whether it was sheep, cattle or arable farming that he had in mind. “No,” he said, “Wind farming”.
This is a timely debate, having regard to the KPMG report Thinking About the Affordable published this week. The report says that government plans for wind farms are too expensive and should be shelved in favour of cheaper nuclear and gas-fired power stations. Government plans to cut pollution by a third by 2020 rest heavily on wind power and will cost £108 billion to implement. The report says that shifting away from turbines towards nuclear and gas-fired power stations would slash the bill by £34 billion, which is equal to around £550 for every person in this country. Wind power is accordingly one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation to build. Wind farms are expensive to operate as they depend on nature, which means they often do not run at full capacity. It is claimed that they run at 31 per cent of capacity but analysis of past performance in the UK suggests that 21 per cent is nearer to the truth. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister the Government’s reaction to this report.
In 2005 the Welsh Assembly Government issued TAN 8, the technical advice note meant to guide planning decisions relating to renewable energy projects. TAN 8 identified seven strategic search areas as suitable for concentrated, large-scale wind farm development, three of which were in mid-Wales. The focus is on mid-Wales because Snowdonia National Park lies to the north and Brecon Beacons National Park to the south. Targets for capacity have varied from 1.1 gigawatts originally to 2.5 gigawatts in 2007, falling back to 2 gigawatts in 2010, all to be constructed within the SSAs by 2015.
In mid-Wales, schemes have been proposed for 800 turbines up to 600 feet tall, spreading through the Severn valley and into the hills above the Meifod and Vyrnwy valleys. Of course, there are no connections to the national grid in the area so these schemes require a network of electricity pylons, running to a substation at either Abermule or Cefn Coch, spread over some 28 acres. That substation will require a link of 154-feet-tall mega-pylons across the rest of Montgomeryshire and into England, all the way through Shropshire to Telford some 45 miles away. There are currently some 200 pylons in existence in Powys. ScottishPower Renewables is into the second phase of its proposals to build a 135-megawatt wind farm of 35 pylons—the highest in Europe at 600 feet—on land that it has leased from the Forestry Commission in the Dyfnant forest. They will tower over Lake Vyrnwy and the beautiful countryside around. In response to the proposal for these pylons put forward by ScottishPower and National Grid, some 500 people turned up to a protest meeting at the Meifod rugby club—and this is a very small village—at the end of March. In May the biggest protest demonstration in the Welsh Assembly’s history took place in Cardiff with some 2,000 people. In Welshpool in June, 2,000 people attended to protest and to watch on a large screen the proceedings of Powys County Council where a motion calling for the review of the TAN 8 policy was passed unanimously with only one abstention. Shropshire County Council has also declared itself to be unanimously against this proposal and all the parish councils involved have expressed their opposition. As a result of all this pressure Carwyn Jones, the Welsh Assembly Government’s First Minister, realised finally what the previous Government had let loose with TAN 8 and in a reversal of previous policy said on 17 June:
“Planning guidelines on the number of wind farms should in future be regarded as an upper limit. The Welsh Government wants the UK government to devolve powers over large-scale energy generation projects. We cannot accept a position where decisions made outside Wales will lead to inappropriate development for the people of Wales. The Welsh Government believe this level of development is unacceptable in view of its wider impacts on the local area”.
Mr Jones hoped that the United Kingdom Government would respect his announcement and would not allow proliferation when they take decisions on individual projects in Wales. He concluded by saying:
“My government would not support the construction of large pylons in mid-Wales and my ministers are pressing this case with National Grid Transmission and with Ofgem”.
What is this Government’s response? They have rejected Mr Jones’s demand for further devolution but surely the Department of Energy and Climate Change will not ride roughshod over the express will of parish councils, county councils, the Welsh Assembly Government and, most importantly, the whole community of Montgomeryshire, Shropshire and beyond. According to the Telegraph on 9 October a spokesman for DECC said:
“All applications for wind farm developments and electricity network infrastructure should be dealt with on a case by case basis, taking into account the views of local people”.
Who exactly is going to deal with these applications? Name the Minister. Who will balance the antagonism of local people, the expressed hostility of their representatives, the obvious environmental considerations, and the impact on tourism and the local economy against the expensive and limited capacity for generating electricity that these wind farms possess? The impact on the people and the beautiful countryside will be devastating. I do not share the gleam in the eye of those who try to tell us that turbines are a thing of beauty. It is all a question of proportion. The countryside can absorb a certain number of these structures. Indeed, in Dulas valley near Machynlleth, the first community-owned wind turbine in the United Kingdom was erected in 2003 and serves the local population, who own it, very well. But 800 turbines in the area proposed will be completely and wholly out of proportion. If localism means anything at all to this Government, the ruination of the hills should be taken by bodies that are accountable locally.
For those who think that mid-Wales is an empty and barren land that does not matter, I advise them to read the report commissioned during the Dulas valley inquiry of 1970 from the University of Aberystwyth, which stressed the value of the strong community life, the strength of the culture and the human effects of the proposed development upon a mid-Wales community. At that time, the Secretary of State for Wales, Lord Cledwyn, determined and announced that no Welsh valley would be sacrificed again. It is time for the Secretary of State for Wales in the present Government to step in and to follow that precedent.
Lord Williams of Elvel
My Lords, the House will be most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for introducing this subject and for concentrating on the theme of localism, which I want to follow up on because it is vitally important. It is a matter that has got slightly confused over the years. Let me start with TAN 8, which the noble Lord introduced us to.
TAN 8 went through a consultation process, a recent analysis of which has shown that 66 per cent of consultees opposed it and 7 per cent were in favour. Even at its promulgation, TAN 8 was unpopular with all the consultees who the Welsh Assembly Government had invited to comment. That went through to the selection of the SSAs. These strategic search areas were identified by a Danish company, Arup, on the grounds of simple criteria. Social conditions were not part of the criteria to identify them. The result was that we had three SSAs in mid-Wales, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, quite rightly points out—they were B, C and D, to be technical about it—where the criteria were basically the number of people who did not live there; that is, the most beautiful wildernesses in mid-Wales.
The result of TAN 8, curiously enough, has been slightly perverse. It was designed to stop what is known as pepper-potting, with wind turbines being put up all over Wales, and to concentrate on serious and strategic areas. The problem with that, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has pointed out, is that this gave rise to large applications because if you were going to try and meet the targets which the Welsh Assembly Government had set in terms of carbon emissions from Wales, you had to make sure that the applications were of large sizes. The result is that we have a number of applications—I will not go through the whole list—with, for example, 160 megawatts, 150 megawatts, 140 megawatts or 170 megawatts of installed capacity. It is a long list and the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has given us a graphic idea of the total, so what happens then?
What happens is that these applications are outside the control of the Welsh Assembly Government, the local authority and local people, so they come to Westminster—originally under the Electricity Act 1989 but now, because of rearrangements in the planning mechanisms, these applications would come through the Infrastructure Planning Commission. We read in the Localism Bill that that commission is to be abolished, so that it will become an infrastructure planning inspectorate inside the general inspectorate. The ultimate decision would be for a Secretary of State. I have no quarrel with that remedy but I have a quarrel about which Secretary of State would be responsible for this—I follow the noble Lord, Lord Thomas. Would it be the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who sits for an English constituency? Would it be the Secretary of State for Wales, who sits for an English constituency? Would it be the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who sits for an English constituency? In any way, it would be determined by somebody who has no particular interest in ensuring the benefits of mid-Wales.
We had an example of this in the previous Government, which I attacked then and would attack now. The wind farm at Cefn Croes, in the middle of the Cambrian Mountains—one of the most beautiful places in the world, let alone the United Kingdom—was opposed by every planning authority in mid-Wales. It went to London and one of my colleagues in the Westminster Government simply signed it off. Did he go and visit the site? No. Did he consult with various people? No. It was simple ideology: he wanted to ensure that there was enough capacity in whatever it was, however it was done. It is that which we must avoid.
What happens when an application for a wind farm of over 50 megawatts of installed capacity comes to the Secretary of State? Will he or she look at the criteria that Arup introduced to define these selected areas? What is important, wilderness and wind speed or social conditions and communities? What happens when the Secretary of State receives the application and says, “I’m not bothered about mid-Wales. That is not my interest at all”? We have to ensure that localism means something rather than simply being a theory. It would be perfectly possible to ensure by some mechanism or other that localism actually counted, and I hope very much that the Minister will give us that reassurance.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I am very aware that I am not a resident of Wales so I shall be careful in what I say. However, some months ago, as part of a business trip—nothing to do with energy or renewables—I passed through central Wales. I stayed there for the evening and enjoyed the hospitality, the scenery and the countryside. I noticed a number of signs and placards there around renewable energy, so I fully accept that this is a major issue in that area. I live in another Celtic part of the United Kingdom, one that has high wind potential with regard to renewable energy. It has a number of wind farms and similar issues to those of Wales, although maybe not to the same degree.
It is important to remember the slightly broader context to this debate—that is not a justification, but it puts the debate in a broader context—of global warming and the need to decarbonise our electricity supply chain in this country and indeed further afield than that. Global warming exists, it is happening, it is dangerous and it will have major effects not just on our own country but much more widely. The Berkeley earth surface temperature study has recently taken place. A study that was originally very sceptical about the question of temperatures and global warming looked at the University of East Anglia results and the controversy about the Hadley Centre, and came back to say that global warming was really happening.
We have to go through the process of decarbonisation and the Government have some excellent strategies towards that: energy efficiency; new nuclear, which some of my colleagues might disagree with rather more; carbon capture and storage; and renewables. Why those four different things? Because this is such an important issue that we cannot have just one approach to it. We have to have a multifaceted approach to the problem, and that is true of electricity generation as well.
One small point about the KPMG report is that onshore wind generation is not one of the most expensive technologies but quite the opposite: it is actually one of the least expensive. Offshore wind, wave, geothermal and various other technologies are more expensive than onshore wind; that is not even slightly contestable. The other thing about the report—and I was rather surprised that KPMG put its name to something that was so shaky in its economic analysis—is that it looks purely at capital cost. Those of us who have had anything whatever to do with business or industry understand that, in terms of cash flow or assessing projects, looking only at capital cost means nothing. In fact, if we looked purely at that, we as a civilisation would still be in the stone age rather than where we are now. Some people might welcome that, but I personally am not one of those who are into deindustrialisation.
The important thing about renewables is that the ongoing fuel cost is far less. If we look at those countries such as Denmark and Spain that bothered to invest in renewables way back in the past, we see that the energy prices where there is a much higher renewable content have not increased at anything like the rate that our own energy costs have in the UK. I remind the Minister that in the five-year period 2004 to 2009, electricity costs went up by 75 per cent and gas costs by 120 per cent—far higher than any costs that would have resulted from renewable energy.
In fact, if we invest suitably in renewable energy we will have a much lower cost increase in future. Onshore wind generation is a good solution in terms of renewable energy and decarbonising the economy and a good way of tackling global warming. One of the cheaper ways of producing renewable energy is hydro—including dams in the type of area where my noble friend, quite rightly, campaigned. However, there is less ability in the UK to build extra hydro than onshore wind generation.
The crux of this argument, with which I absolutely agree, is about the concentration of wind turbines in a particular area and providing access to the national grid, such as by building pylons. I have sympathy for Wales, and central Wales in particular, because the plans that have come back to the Welsh Government have delineated specific areas and there is a problem with that. What is required is for the Welsh Assembly and Government to look at changing those criteria and moving it away from DECC, which should not make those sorts of decisions for the UK. We would then have the right solution for Wales that would also challenge and affect global warming.
Lord Rowe-Beddoe
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for securing this short debate on a subject which clearly deserves a considerably longer hearing.
The current plans to construct a further 600 to 800 onshore turbines in mid-Wales are unacceptable on two counts. First, there is the wanton destruction of an extraordinary environment, which has already been referred to. Secondly, there is the further development of an inefficient and absurdly expensive solution to achieving the targets for CO2 emissions that the UK has undertaken, and for increased use of renewables.
As the Member for Montgomery said a few weeks ago in the other place, mid-Wales truly,
“is a place of great beauty … it underpins the most important and largest part of the local economy—tourism”.—[Official Report, 10/6/11; col. 347WH.]
Although mid-Wales constitutes some two-thirds of the land mass of our country, its population is small and, apart from sheep farming, tourism is the only other major sector upon which the economy is dependent. In addition to these 800 new onshore turbines, there is the installation—as has been mentioned—of a 20-acre electricity substation and 100 miles of new cable, mostly carried on 150-foot-high steel towers. No wonder the local populace is protesting.
According to the Country Guardian website, by August this year 275 different groups had been formed throughout the UK to object to the impact of planned wind farm developments, 30 of which are in Wales. That is 11 per cent of the total, which is disproportionate to the 5 per cent of the UK population that the area represents. It is too easy for Government and other industrial protagonists of this vandalism to characterise the protestors as guilty of nimbyism. That is a slanderous description. Their approach is not “nimby”; if anything, it is “nioby”—not in our back yard, and not in the nation's back yard that is the beautiful and unique topography of these isles, which both this Parliament and the devolved Administrations must have a primary duty to protect.
Financial analysis is available to all. Anyone can see that the costs far outweigh the effective generation of electricity in comparison to other sources. What can Government do to take the heat out of this most contentious issue and give leadership to the development of alternative forms of electricity production? It will not surprise your Lordships if I return to the Severn barrage, a mega-project that would generate more than 5 per cent of the total UK electricity requirement by using the power of the second-largest rise and fall of tide in the world. Ironically, this year is the 100th anniversary of the first reference to a Severn barrage for energy purposes, made by a Frenchman in 1911. Since then, between 1926 and 1989, there have been many government and privately-sponsored investigations. Since the Sustainable Development Commission’s report of October 2007, which was largely constructive in its approach, Governments continue to be reluctant to give the scheme their backing.
Despite past cross-party support in the other place, led at that time by the previous Secretary of State for Wales, little has happened until now. A private sector consortium, Corlan Hafren, has set about the task of making it happen. It should be supported. Its plans appear to incorporate the most recent engineering developments, with environmental outcomes that are,
“no worse than at present, and possibly better”.
In addition to its extraordinary relevance to achieving UK targets, the construction and associated infrastructure of the barrage would be set to create 100,000 jobs. Perhaps the Minister would care to note the Financial Times report of 24 November 2010, in which the Secretary of State is reported as saying that,
“there would be no state funding for the Severn tidal power project”.
The Energy Minister followed this by stating:
“My officials are talking to private sector consortia about their ideas”.
Later, the Secretary of State is reported to have said:
“I think the Severn barrage will eventually happen and will provide about 7 per cent of all the electricity in the UK. When it does it will involve a lot of different businesses. But investors will need assurance that the government is behind it”.
Therefore, the question is: when?
Finally, at the other end of the scale is biomass. In Wales the use of biomass fuel lags well behind that in Germany and other countries. The technology is proven, there are grants and funding incentives and a supply infrastructure is in place. Wales has an abundant timber resource: 13 per cent of its land mass is woodland, of which some 75,000 hectares is unmanaged private woodland. Biomass systems are not designed just for individual domestic use. Already there are examples of their use in Wales by organisations such as the new Rhondda hospital in Llwynypia and the Office for National Statistics in Newport. The Welsh Government happily lead the way, with a biomass system installed in the Senedd building.
There are alternatives. Let us pause and reconsider the effects of these policies in destroying our beautiful countryside. If we do not, the ugly results will be the inheritance of future generations at grossly unacceptable cost.
Lord Howie of Troon
My Lords, I hesitate to intervene in what is clearly a Welsh evening but I am happy to come to the aid of my fellow Celts on this occasion. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, on securing this debate and on the powerful manner in which he introduced it.
I should say that I have a kind of background in Wales. Older Members of the House, if there are any present, may remember that I spent a lifetime in the construction industry and younger Members should take note of that now. In my civil engineering days I was involved in the Milford Haven power station, in a coal mine near Llanelli, in a gas works near Neath and in the Wylfa nuclear power station in north Wales. I have a background in the energy business, although I was on the construction side of the infrastructure for the industry.
I am with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, in that I want to widen the debate from the specific mid-Wales aspect. I regard that as a microcosm of what is likely to happen through the rest of the country. Many years ago, as a relatively new Member of the House—I think that Jim Callaghan was the Prime Minister although I am not too sure—I drew attention to my experience with Milford Haven and suggested to the House that if we were to replace the Milford Haven oil-powered station, which produced 2,000 megawatts, we would have required something like 2,000 windmills, as we called them in those days. They have now been upgraded to wind turbines. I said at the time that they would stretch from Cardiff, at roughly every 100 yards, around the coast to the Mersey. The turbines are stronger now and would stretch for only half that distance—but that is the scale that we are talking about. I reminded the House more recently that if you took the Thames array—an offshore assembly that is no longer called a farm but an array—it would stretch from the House here in one direction as far as the Tate Modern and in the other direction as far as King’s Cross railway station. We are talking about covering large swathes of the country with wind turbines, or windmills—call them what you like.
Speaking as an engineer, I would not mind that if they actually produced the energy that they are thought to produce. However, they do not. If one looks back to the coldest day of the winter in December last year, wind power produced 0.04 per cent—I repeat, 0.04 per cent—of the energy required to heat the homes of this country on that day. That figure is derisory. The idea that wind power, which is intermittent, can replace any other form of electricity production is a miasma at best. In order to make up for the periods when windmills are not producing electricity, there has to be a back-up. I refer again to Milford Haven. If we had had the 2,000 megawatts of wind power in Wales that failed, as it happened, last year, one would still have needed Milford Haven power station as a back-up. One would not have replaced it. The idea that windmills will help us is an illusion.
I shall conclude by drawing attention to a book published two years ago by James Lovelock. It is entitled The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He was a guru of Greenpeace at its beginning, but is now thought of as an apostate. We need 70 gigawatts of electricity. He said that the footprint of a nuclear power station producing 1 gigawatt is 30 acres. The footprint for 1 gigawatt of wind power is 1,000 square miles. I tend to giggle at that thought.
I shall not go on any longer, but I should say this. The Minister and the shadow Minister on the Front Bench should get hold of Lovelock’s book and read it. If they read it and apply its message, they would save all the bother in mid-Wales and in the rest of the country as well.
Baroness Randerson
My Lords, the background to this debate is a very confused situation. It is confused because renewable energy development in Wales is divided between the UK Government and the Welsh Government, with 50 megawatts, as you have heard, as the dividing line. It is also confused because, to be honest, the Welsh Government have got themselves into a particular pickle over TAN 8, which is the guidance that has been referred to. This was never a good document, but it is now badly out of date. It was always too heavily reliant on wind power: there are 12 pages of guidance on wind power, but three pages on every other type of renewable energy.
It is also out of date because the capacity targets it refers to appear to be greatly exceeded now in terms of potential. In each of the seven designated areas, the capacity targets seem now to be understated. In fact the Welsh Government do not seem to know whether they are targets or maxima; various Welsh government documents refer to them variously as targets, or, on the other hand, as maxima. Yet the report last year by Arup showed that the planning applications in the pipeline at the moment far exceed the capacity targets. It is quite logical: as time goes on, technical capacity increases and therefore the targets that you set in 2005 are out of date by the time you get to 2011. Indeed, earlier this year the Welsh Government said that it was their aspiration to reach 2 gigawatts as a target in the seven areas by 2013 to 2015. Faced with an absolute uproar in mid-Wales, they are now rowing back from that. However, we do not know whether it is a target or a maximum.
I obviously agree with noble Lords who have stated how strongly they feel about the beauty of mid-Wales. I am a strong supporter of renewable energy but I believe that we have to preserve our best, and the wonderful and unique scenery of mid-Wales comes into that category. It is important to remember the importance of the tourism industry in that area as well. An area which has difficulty in attracting jobs cannot afford to lose its tourist industry.
There is a particular problem in mid-Wales because of the lack of grid infrastructure. This is what has sparked the latest opposition. At the moment, people feel very strongly about the mid-Wales connection project. TAN 8 is hopelessly optimistic on this as well. It said that if extra grid capacity were needed as a result of the wind farm development, it should come via underground cables. We know that that is far too expensive to contemplate on the scale which would be necessary. However, I have a letter from the Minister, written in July, which said:
“Where new grid is required, we expect the grid company and regulator to ensure that it is located, designed and installed as sensitively as possible, using appropriate techniques, including the use of undergrounding”.
Including the use of undergrounding is different from burying all cables underground. There is plenty of anger and plenty of confusion.
One point of confusion could be overcome if the power over developments of more than 50 megawatts could be delegated—devolved—to the Welsh Assembly. At the moment, the UK Government decide whether a wind farm can be developed and the Welsh Government decide the detail, if it is more than 50 megawatts. That is inappropriate. I strongly argue for devolution of those powers. The Silk commission has recently been established to consider the extent of Welsh devolution, and I very much hope that it will consider this issue as part of its remit. Given that TAN 8 envisaged that 1,700 megawatts in total would be coming from the seven SSAs, the 50-megawatt limit is a very low threshold. It is completely arbitrary. I argue that it appears increasingly out of date.
Finally, I return to my point that the balance of TAN 8 was wrong. Too much emphasis was placed on wind. We need much greater exploitation of Wales’s greatest assets: its rivers and tides. The Severn barrage was sensibly abandoned by the coalition Government. It was too costly, it would come in too late and it would have destroyed a major SSSI, but there are good alternatives, and many of them.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, your Lordships' House should thank the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for doing us a service by holding this debate in his name this evening. It has been a timely and stimulating debate with a great deal of interest in this House and beyond. It makes us understand the strongly held views on the issue. I shall take my lead from the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Howie of Troon, in addressing the general issues and lead from that into the specific ones.
I was interested in the exchange between the noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about the Severn barrage. Whatever form of energy we suggest, there will be strongly held views on all sides of the argument, as we have heard this evening. However, we cannot underestimate the challenges that we face in seeking to improve the security of energy supply and to meet the Government’s target to reduce carbon emissions. Today's report from the International Energy Agency has not been mentioned, although KPMG has. That report makes it clear that if no substantive action is taken to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and reduce carbon, we will have lost the opportunity to tackle climate change in the next five years—a sobering thought.
The UK is committed to increasing the amount of electricity generated from renewables, such as wind and solar, from 7 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020—although I have to say that, given the Government’s appalling decision on the feed-in tariffs, it will be interesting to know how they can possibly reach those targets. The solar business has been virtually destroyed: 77 per cent of businesses that responded to a poll for BusinessGreen said that they will now scrap their plans to install solar PV; only 6 per cent said that they will carry on. I welcome the noble Baroness to the Dispatch Box tonight. Can she say anything about how the Government intend to achieve the 30 per cent by 2020, and whether that commitment remains? That would be very helpful.
In the light of that decision, there will be greater attention on wind power. I found the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, speaking from the Liberal Democrat Benches, interesting, as the Liberal Democrats were even more ambitious than the Government at the time of the previous election, and made even greater commitments in their election manifesto to renewable energy, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, mentioned. That manifesto stated:
“Climate change is the greatest challenge facing this generation. Liberal Democrats are unwavering in our commitment: runaway climate change must be stopped … We will set a target for 40 per cent of UK electricity to come from clean, non-carbon-emitting sources by 2020, rising to 100 per cent by 2050”,
with three-quarters from marine and offshore.
At that time, I understand that the party was not in favour of new nuclear, so the remaining 25 per cent would have to have included significant onshore wind. Despite that commitment to offshore wind, it is significantly more expensive in both installation and maintenance—as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said—and is probably not as efficient as onshore wind. As people worry about turning on the heating as it gets colder, every effort must be taken to protect the consumer from even higher bills. If renewables, including wind power, can play a part in energy security and in keeping those longer-term costs down, we must act responsibly in the interests of the consumer. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, quoted KPMG’s report; I was interested in the demolition of it made by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, as I had read the same report. It is unfortunate that we do not have a full report from KPMG, so we cannot analyse the figures that it has put out. However, if we look at the options that the report seems to prefer, we can see that the costs that also have to be taken into account for new nuclear, as well as the capital bill—which would be less than for wind power—include not just the construction but the fuel, security and clean-up costs, which run into very large amounts.
The questions that we need to ask ourselves are: does onshore wind have a role to play? If so, is it cost-effective? If that is the case, how do we achieve it, and how can we minimise the concerns that have been raised and best address those issues of location and infrastructure that cause such concern? Compared with other European countries we are not maximising our potential, despite government commitments. The population of Denmark is 10 per cent of that of the UK, yet it has 84 per cent of the amount of onshore wind. Twenty per cent of Danish energy is supplied by wind, with electricity costs about 14 per cent lower than the UK, and in Germany they are about 7 per cent lower.
The greatest concerns we have heard on costs are the capital costs. It would be helpful to know whether the Government have made any assessment of how those costs could be reduced, using the European examples of economies of scale, for example, or of any plans to do some kind of assessment of how the capital costs—the initial costs—could be reduced. I apologise for not giving the noble Baroness advance notice of that, but perhaps she could write to me at some point.
The other issue on wind power is the consequential effect of job creation. A survey in Wales indicated that the average wage in the wind energy sector was around £44,000 a year. There is an opportunity for the Government here, and it was articulated just two weeks ago by 100 leading economists in their Plan B: A Good Economy for a Good Society, when they identified that a green new deal would create thousands of jobs, stimulating growth through investing in SMEs and new technologies and, in particular, nurturing the UK renewables sector. It is clear that there are benefits to be gained, but very important issues have been raised tonight about location and infrastructure. The noble Lords, Lord Thomas and Lord Williams of Elvel, both referred to the planning process, and I agree that there is a lack of clarity since the Localism Bill about transitional arrangements. That is an issue that would have benefited from discussion during proceedings on the Localism Bill in your Lordships’ House.
The point that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, makes, is a very important one. There is plenty of evidence that, although the public as a whole support wind farms and renewable energy in principle, in practice they also have very genuine concerns about where they are to be sited. It is wrong to dismiss those concerns when they are genuinely felt, but it would also be wrong to fail to proceed with the contribution that onshore wind can make if those fears can be addressed.
We have heard today about the very specific issues in Wales, and the concerns that decisions will be taken in London—in Westminster—rather than locally, where Ministers can hear local concerns and address problems themselves. There are issues, as we have heard, about the national grid, the infrastructure and pylons. I see the noble Baroness the Whip on her feet—I am winding up very quickly. In regard to the questions put by the noble Lords, Lord Thomas of Gresford and Lord Williams of Elvel, what discussions have the Government had with Welsh Ministers on the scale and routing of the national grid to TAN 8 areas? Along the lines that have been discussed by many noble Lords this evening, are the Government minded to devolve the consenting rights for larger projects to the Wales Government?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, if you do not mind me interrupting, already the Minister has not got the 12 minutes she was allocated, so if we could allow her to reply it would be very helpful.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for initiating this debate and I am grateful for the contributions from all noble Lords.
The introduction of wind farms is a significant matter and, like any significant matter that brings about change, it will always attract comment and some concern. On matters such as this, it is important that people have a chance to voice their opinions and that Ministers listen. I am certainly grateful for the opportunity to listen tonight and to respond to some of the points that have been raised.
With something of this significance, it is usual for people in their communities to want to understand what the overall objective is and what we are trying to achieve. People will want to know about and understand the process. They will want to know how decisions are made, what criteria determine those decisions, whether all issues that are of concern to them are being taken into account, and whether they can have a say. People also, quite rightly, want to know what the gains are from these decisions and whether they are gains from which they, too, can benefit.
Perhaps I should start by reminding your Lordships that the Government have three strategic aims in relation to energy and climate change: to secure the supply of energy—what we often talk about as keeping the lights on; to minimise costs to consumers; and to cut fossil fuel emissions so that we play our part in taking care of the planet for the sake of future generations. Renewable energy is vital to delivering our strategic aims and we are committed to it. Appropriately sited onshore wind needs to be part of our energy mix because it is one of the most cost-effective and established renewable technologies.
The noble Lord, Lord Howie of Troon, for whose expertise in and knowledge of all matters engineering I have great respect, talked about the intermittency of wind energy. Wind power is not in and of itself the answer—no one is suggesting that it is a solution—but it is an important part of the mix. Other noble Lords talked about other renewable technologies that are out there. The noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, and my noble friend Lady Randerson mentioned the Severn barrage and asked what is happening with it. If a private company were to come forward with a new proposal for a Severn barrage, the Government would listen and would definitely want to hear what it had to say. However, it is worth my pointing out that even an option such as that would still require major grid reinforcements to connect it to the national grid.
Noble Lords also asked about other options. The noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, asked what other renewables we are considering and mentioned biomass fuel. I take this opportunity to remind noble Lords that in July this year the Government published their renewables road map, which set out the various renewable technologies that would form part of their plan for hitting the target of 20 per cent of renewables by 2010. The noble Baroness mentioned a figure of 30 per cent but the target is actually 20 per cent. Biomass plays an important part in that. Indeed, it is one of the leading contributors.
Returning to wind power, my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford and other noble Lords mentioned the recent KPMG report and its criticisms of wind power. It is important that I point out, as did my noble friend Lord Teverson, that, in focusing exclusively on the upfront capital costs of technologies, the report does not take into account the long-term benefits to consumers of energy sources that involve no ongoing fuel costs. Let us be clear: unlike other types of fuel, wind is free. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, asked how we can go about reducing the capital costs of wind farms. I shall have to explore that and will write to the noble Baroness.
Affordability obviously figures in all our decisions. Nothing is more important to consumers today and that will continue into the future. That is why we are reshaping our renewable subsidies to get a better bang for the buck, targeting support where it is needed and driving costs down in the long run. For example, we are consulting on proposals to reduce the level of support to onshore wind by one-tenth in the renewables obligation banding review. I am talking about the subsidies to those who operate onshore wind farms. We are also consulting on the proposed introduction of new feed-in tariffs for solar panels based on the evidence of falling costs. Although some might question the reduction in subsidies, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, did, let us not forget that the cost of all these subsidies is paid for by bill payers. These subsidies are not met from general taxation. Overall, the long-term national interest lies in cutting carbon and keeping the lights on in the most cost-effective way possible and substantial amounts of renewable energy will be needed to do that.
If that is the what and the why of what we are trying to do, let me now turn to how we decide, which has been an important topic of today’s debate. Clearly I recognise, as do the Government, that proposed onshore wind developments in Wales and their associated energy infrastructure have raised a lot of interest and debate in recent months. Your Lordships will understand that I cannot comment on specific applications, but let me say something about the process. First, the Welsh Government’s TAN 8 policy has designated specific areas in mid-Wales as strategic search areas, sometimes known as SSAs, as potential locations for major wind farms. The noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, and my noble friend Lady Randerson questioned the validity of TAN 8, but that is a matter for the Welsh Assembly. It is not something for me to comment on. It is a devolved matter.
Local authorities in Wales are responsible for deciding planning applications within the devolved planning policy for smaller—less than 50 megawatt—farms. The Westminster Government are responsible for deciding on major energy infrastructure projects that affect Wales. Some may argue, as some of your Lordships have this evening, that it is not appropriate for UK Ministers to make decisions on major infrastructure applications in Wales, but UK Ministers are accountable to Welsh voters, as they are to English voters. We believe that it is appropriate for UK Ministers to take these decisions on major infrastructure of national importance and of relevance to the UK Government’s wider strategic aims that I have already outlined.
I will not take up your Lordships’ time by trying to describe the different processes and policies that are followed, because they are quite detailed, but the key thing for me to stress is that regardless of whether applications are dealt with nationally or locally, communities must be and are being consulted on all proposed developments before decisions are reached. Crucially, all decisions are taken on a case-by-case basis so that local factors can be taken fully into account.
Mid-Wales is a beautiful part of the United Kingdom. It is important that wind farms are sited correctly and wind energy developers are guided away from the most sensitive landscapes, such as national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. Moreover, protections are in place to ensure that detailed environmental assessments are made in the preparation of planning applications, including, most importantly—and I will stress this—an assessment of cumulative impact.
I know that it is not just the wind farms that are causing concern. My noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford and others have asked about the supporting infrastructure. As there is no existing high-voltage network in this part of Wales, the necessary infrastructure to make these connections will have to be built. Connection options are currently being developed by National Grid and ScottishPower Energy Networks. The applications for these connections will be decided by the appropriate planning authorities. Many people feel very strongly about pylons and the impact they can have on the landscape. Effective consultation with local communities and other interested parties is therefore a vital part of the planning process and this is ongoing. An important point I would like to stress is that National Grid has also recently announced that it will put greater emphasis on mitigating the visual impact of its new electricity lines, while balancing this with the obvious need to minimise household energy bills. People in areas potentially affected can therefore be reassured that alternatives to overhead lines are being actively explored.
I wanted to talk about the economic benefits of wind farms to us as a nation and to local communities. My noble friend Lord Teverson has covered some of these already. I would like to pick out a couple of points. The wind sector in Wales is creating high-value jobs. The average wage for those jobs is around £44,000 a year. The annual contribution to the Welsh economy is estimated at £158 million a year. We have consulted on a proposal for communities in England to retain the business rates generated by renewable energy developments. This matter would be devolved in Wales, but I would urge influential noble Lords with connections to the Welsh Assembly to highlight what is happening in England and the benefits that may be enjoyed in Wales if it was to follow that idea. A good example of a wind farm developer making sure that there are direct local benefits is the Cefn Croes Wind Farm Community Trust, funded by Cambrian Wind Energy.
Appropriately sited onshore wind farms make a vital contribution to our strategic aims. They are also important to our economic growth. This coalition Government support appropriately sited onshore wind. We will make decisions about where they are located with great care. We will make sure that communities can benefit directly from renewable energy developments in their area. I shall of course ensure that all the points made this evening are relayed accurately back to the department. I thank once more my noble friend for initiating this debate.
Education Bill
(13 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
“( ) The list must be linked to a database of those individuals who have obtained Qualified Teacher Status.”
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
On the basis of assurances given, I shall not move the amendment.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
“( ) persons elected as student governors,”
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, Amendment 2 would enable students to become full members of school governing bodies, as was the case before 1986. Following government amendments, the Bill's requirements for governing bodies more accurately reflect the make-up of the school community. However, one significant absence is that of students.
I was not able to be in my place when this matter was last discussed in Committee on 20 July and I extend my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, for speaking to the relevant amendment in my absence. I understand that the Minister has today received a letter from members of the National Participation Forum, which includes the Schools Network, the British Youth Council, the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, the National Children’s Bureau and UNICEF, all of which support the proposal.
These organisations and many more support children's rights to be involved in decisions that affect them. Children spend a substantial part of their lives in school and it is only right that they should be able to sit on school governing bodies as full members. At present, students can become only associate members, with no voting rights for under-18s and limited voting rights for over-18s.
The existence of school councils and other mechanisms for student participation, useful as they are, should not rule out the possibility of student governors. No one would argue, for example, that teachers should be excluded from governing bodies, or given fewer voting rights, simply because they already benefit from union representation. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has specifically called on countries to put into legislation children's rights to participate in school boards and committees. This Bill presents us with an excellent opportunity to ensure that schools consistently involve children in their governing bodies. This crucial perspective would result in better decision-making for the whole school community.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, the Minister will know that I have always promoted the importance of young people having their say in issues relating to them—in particular, at schools. I have an Oral Question on exactly this subject on 23 November. I certainly support the principle of what the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, is asking for today.
When you are in a coalition, there has to be a bit of “give” and a bit of “take” on both sides. During the passage of this Bill, I think we have had that; we have had some “give” and “take” from both of the coalition partners. I thank my noble friend the Minister for that, and in particular for the fact that we managed to persuade the Government not to remove the schools’ duty to co-operate and about when part-time students start to repay their loans. These are some of those very important things that are now in the Bill.
There have been other examples of where we have considerably strengthened the guidance—for example, on searching and on same-day detentions—and we have made changes to Clause 13. My noble friends and I are still somewhat unhappy about both Clause 13 and Clause 43, but I accept that you cannot have everything in a coalition. In some cases, we have had excellent reassurances from the Dispatch Box, and I think this issue falls into that category. I hope the Minister will be able to assure the House that the Government will do everything they can to ensure that wherever children’s interests are concerned, their voices will be heard and their views taken fully into account. It is very important that that should be done in schools.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, we have some sympathy with the aims behind this amendment, and understand, as I am sure many noble Lords do, the advantages that can flow from giving young people a practical demonstration of democracy and representation. As the noble Lord, Lord Hill, said in an earlier debate on this issue, the previous Government went some way towards expanding pupil representation and consultation with governing bodies. As I understand it, specific provision was made in the Education and Skills Act 2008 to require governing bodies to invite and consider pupils’ views, but this has not yet been enacted. Perhaps the Minister could clarify whether the Government are now going to implement the provision in the previous Act.
In the mean time, I listened very carefully to the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, but would still sound a note of caution on the wording of her amendment. It would seem, as it stands, to apply equally to pupils of all ages, and we are not convinced at this stage that that is the right way to proceed. As the noble Baroness indicated, some primary school pupils might struggle to understand some of the issues on governing body agendas, and there is, as has been pointed out, the issue of whether it is appropriate for them to deal with teacher discipline and conduct issues. It is therefore perhaps more appropriate to find a level of involvement for young people in governance issues that is more age-specific. However, we very much support the idea of strengthening pupil engagement and hope that the Minister is able to suggest other ways in which this might be achieved.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for returning to this issue. As she said, unfortunately she was not able to be present at Committee stage, where some of the important points that she has raised tonight were debated, although she kindly gave us advance notice. I am glad that she has raised them again tonight.
The noble Baroness spoke eloquently of the importance of encouraging pupils to participate in decisions that affect them. I think that support for the principle that she is seeking to achieve is shared on all sides of the House, by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. I would certainly agree with her that involving pupils in that way can help to make sure that decisions properly reflect the interests of pupils, contribute to their development and encourage them to feel a sense of involvement and pride in their school. It is also of course a fundamental principle of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which this Government are a signatory.
The evidence also shows that schools themselves share the views expressed by noble Lords today on this issue. We know that the vast majority of schools involve their pupils in a variety of different ways. Over 95 per cent of schools already have a school council. Pupils of all ages can serve as associate members of governing bodies, which means that they can attend and speak at governing body meetings. Governing bodies have the power to invite pupils of any age to attend and contribute to governing body meetings. That is extremely important.
I share some of the reservations expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, as to the specific amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, in that it would add to our current arrangements a requirement on all governing bodies of all maintained schools to have an unspecified number of student governors. The amendment would apply to the governing bodies of all maintained schools, including nursery schools. It would force all governing bodies to change their instrument of governance and appoint pupil governors, even if they already had effective arrangements for pupil participation in decision-making.
I am keen to continue to talk to the noble Baroness about these issues and about governance more generally, as I think she and I have a shared interest in this issue. However, as she might expect from the conversations we have had on governance, she will know that placing this additional prescription on the constitution of governing bodies runs counter to the Government’s broader policy on school governance, where we are trying to give governing bodies more freedom to recruit governors based on skills and to minimise prescription around the proportions of governors required from different categories.
I have reflected on the points that were made in Committee and again today, but I continue to believe that there are sufficient ways for governing bodies to take account of pupil views. I do not think it would be right to place a mandatory requirement on all maintained schools—including primary schools—to appoint pupil governors. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, mentioned the Education and Skills Act provisions on pupil consultation. There is a requirement on schools to have regard to guidance on pupil consultation, an issue which my noble friend Lady Walmsley raised. We will be talking about that further in response to her Oral Question.
I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, knows that I am always ready to talk to her about governance, and I am happy to talk further about this issue. While I agree with her on the importance of involving pupils and the benefits this can bring, I cannot support this specific amendment. I would therefore ask her to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I am most grateful to all those who said a few words, some in support and some not in support of my amendment. I am particularly grateful to the Minister because he has been extremely helpful in many respects as far as the role of governors is concerned. Wearing my NGA hat—I should perhaps have said earlier that I am president of that organisation—I know that it, too, is very grateful for the value that he and the Government place on the important role of governors.
I am obviously sorry that the Minister cannot move quite as far as I would like to move. However, I shall continue to hope that I shall live long enough to see my particular wish come true. With that, I am happy to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Hill of Oareford
“(ba) the members to include—(i) staff and students at the institution, and(ii) in the case of a sixth form college corporation, parents of students at the institution aged under 19,”
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, I will speak briefly to government Amendment 3, which maintains a requirement for colleges to have staff, student and, in the case of sixth form colleges, parent governors. It addresses the commitment that I made on Report to return to the House with an amendment that would give effect to what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, sought to achieve in laying down her amendment on Report. I am glad that this amendment has her support, and I am grateful to her for raising this issue with my honourable friend Mr Hayes, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. We have stuck to her amendment as closely as we could. The only change that we have made is to add parent governors for sixth form colleges, which I am sure is what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, would have intended.
It was not our intention to encourage colleges to remove staff, student or parent governors. We merely wanted to ensure that any legislative requirements did not affect any case to the ONS for the reclassification of colleges back to the private sector. We believe, as I know the noble Baroness does, that it is possible to reconcile both those important objectives, and this amendment does that. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, I am grateful for the earlier discussions held with the Minister and his colleague, John Hayes. As the Minister said, he indicated on Report that the Government were prepared to reconsider the issue of staff and student representation. I am pleased to say that this commitment has now been honoured in both spirit and practice in the amendment before us.
It was, of course, the Government’s own amendment that created the issue of representation being withdrawn and quite rightly caused consternation among students and staff. However, on this occasion the Government have been quick to acknowledge the error and put it right. In fact, I would go further and acknowledge that their amendment is indeed better than that tabled by those on our own Benches on this issue, so I am very pleased to support it and for our proceedings on this Bill to end on such a positive note.
Since this will be my last contribution on the Bill, perhaps I could say a few words, particularly on behalf of my noble friend Lady Hughes—who cannot be here this evening but is now the proud grandmother of a baby girl—and also my noble friends Lady Crawley, Lord Young and Lord Stevenson. I thank the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for the courteous and good-natured way in which they have responded to the wide, varied and sometimes extremely controversial issues that noble Lords have chosen to raise on the Bill as we have progressed through it over the months. We started debating the Bill in May, and at times it has truly felt like a marathon. However, throughout the time the Minister has maintained an open door policy and has genuinely sought to answer and deal with our concerns, and for that we are very grateful.
I would also like to thank the Bill team for its hard work. At one stage I thought that I might have to employ a secretary just to keep track of its daily letters. When it started to send letters summarising the previous letters that it had sent, I realised that it was not just me who was having trouble keeping up. I appreciate that all that was intended to be helpful, and it certainly helped us to improve the scrutiny of the Bill.
At the end of the day, the Bill is a better Bill and the time was, in retrospect, well spent. However, I have no doubt that the Secretary of State is as we speak fervently brewing up his next grand plan and that it will not be long before we find ourselves back here again. But, for now, I thank the Minister and urge support for the amendment.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for this amendment. I am somewhat relieved, as is the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, who cannot be here tonight, because it was our amendment about the ONS issue that really sparked the whole debate about student and staff representation in further education colleges. I am grateful for that. In conjunction with the other thanks, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and the noble Lord, Lord Henley, for their contribution to the Bill on the higher education elements that we had earlier. I am extremely grateful to all the Ministers for the concessions that we had in guidance and in other helpful ways, which have happened during the passage of the Bill. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has said, that has helped to improve the Bill from its original state.
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, I am grateful for the support for this amendment, which strikes the right balance between raising the issues raised with respect to college classification while safeguarding staff, student and parent voices on the governing body of a college. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for the spirit in which she approached the issue, which summed up how noble Lords on all sides of the House have approached the Bill overall. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, it is over five months since the passage of the Bill started. At that point, we were moving towards the longest day and we are shortly approaching the shortest day. During that nearly half a year I have been extremely grateful for the advice that I have received from all sides of the House.
As a result of the detailed scrutiny to which the Bill and I personally have been subjected, however painful at times, it is a better Bill. We have brought forward a number of amendments in response to concerns that have been raised—on Ofqual enforcement powers, the duty to co-operate, admissions and inspections, teacher anonymity, colleges, apprenticeships and direct payments. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, we have also committed to use statutory guidance or regulations to address concerns raised about behaviour and discipline, careers and part-time students in HE. So I would like to thank in particular my noble friends Lady Walmsley, Lady Brinton and Lady Sharp for their advice, which has helped us. I thank, too, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, who I hope will pass on my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, for the constructive challenge that they have provided throughout. There have been very important contributions on this Bill from all sides, and from the Cross Benches—particularly on SEN issues and the duty to co-operate—and from the Bishops’ Benches, which have underlined the important role that faith schools play across our education system.
I am particularly grateful for one piece of advice that I received from my noble friend Lord Lucas, which I thought summed up our deliberations on this Bill. It is a quote from John Stuart Mill, who must have been sitting in Committee when he said:
“Education, in its largest sense, is one of the most inexhaustible of all topics … and notwithstanding the great mass of excellent things which have been said respecting it, no thoughtful person finds any lack of things both great and small still waiting to be said”.
I thought that was a pretty good summation of our debate.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, I put publicly on the record what I hope the members of the Bill team know privately—that is, my gratitude to them, as they have been exemplary in every way. I have been very glad to receive lots of praise from many noble Lords about how they have behaved, and I am glad to have the chance to say to them, although they always want to be anonymous and nameless, how much I appreciate the work that they have done and how much it has helped all of us arrive at a better place with the Bill.