Grand Committee
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Arrangement of Business
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel)
My Lords, if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and will resume after 10 minutes.
Protection of Freedoms Bill
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lucas
“(2) A parent shall be given the option of not having the child’s biometric information processed and consent is deemed to be granted if a parent does not request the relevant authority not to process the child’s biometric information.”
Lord Lucas
My Lords, if I may start off with a general remark, let me say that I suspect that I will end up preferring the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, to mine. My purpose in tabling these amendments is to give us a good chance to discuss this part of the Bill, which I think has gone too far in trying to apply to schools special arrangements for dealing with biometric data that are neither required nor sensible.
In the wider world, letting one’s biometric data go is perhaps frightening. What Facebook is up to at the moment—for example, allowing people to tag photographs, such that I can be identified from photographs on other people’s websites because they are tagged with my name and details and the way in which that allows information about me to spread around the world—is worrying enough in our society but would be extremely worrying in, say, Syria. One should be aware of the dangers posed by the widespread ability to identify people remotely. If it became possible at a distance to pick up people’s identity as they passed shop-fronts and gazed into window displays and to have information on fingerprints widely available so that, for example, as soon as I touched a door-handle the store would know who I was, that would, to my mind, be a fairly nightmarish world to be part of. I am very grateful that our Government show no inclination to go down that road and, indeed, at an early stage abandoned identity cards, which would have been a step in that direction.
However, to my mind, in a closed community like a school, those worries do not apply. The school is supposed to know where each kid is all the time. I remember getting terribly upset when a friend of mine had their child knock on the door, having walked a mile home from school without the school having known that the child was absent. You expect a school to know where the children are, you expect it to know what they are doing and you expect it to be in control of them. Within a closed arrangement like a school, having one’s biometric information available is not such a big thing. Within this community of the House of Lords, the place is full of people—thank goodness—who know who we are. That is a biometric recognition system. One of the reasons why this place is secure is that it is full of doorkeepers who would recognise someone who did not belong. Within a school, an automatic system does no more than that, and it is fundamentally no more frightening than that.
A school has a lot of information on the pupils under its charge. A lot of that information is much more sensitive than a hash of some fingerprint—something that would take a great deal of ingenuity to make any real use of if it escaped. A school has information on what children have done in terms of their academic endeavours, what special needs they have, what mischiefs they have committed and people’s opinions of them, which could be extremely sensitive if they appeared in later life. Schools are used to guarding a lot of data about their charges. Whether they do that as perfectly as possible, I do not know, but one very rarely comes across occasions when this information has escaped to people’s embarrassment—when it does, it has usually been released by their mothers who are so proud of the reports that their children have received at school.
This is the context within which we must think about the sort of information which will be available as a result of a biometric recognition system. All that it is doing is scanning the proportions of a face or taking a few data points from the ridges of a fingerprint—but not as many as you would take if you were doing a proper security scan because you want something that works fast rather than completely accurately. There is no common storage format or easy way of that data being made use of by outside people even if they did discover it.
In these circumstances, as I say, you are supposed to know everything that is going on—knowing whether a child is in a classroom is something that a school is supposed to know. By and large, it is quite rare that these systems are used even to that extent. Mostly, they are used just for tagging library books to see who takes them out and to see who is entitled to free school lunches in order to avoid the use of cash and people being labelled as free school-meal kids. There is no identification—they are in a way disguising someone’s identity and protecting their information when used as meal systems. Fundamentally, though, biometric systems are used because they enable a school to do what it should be doing more efficiently and more cheaply than it could without them.
I agree that there is some basis for asking for parental consent. I probably do not naturally start out from that position, but I am convinced of it by what the Government have said, and by things that have been said to me in a long e-mail correspondence with some of the people promoting this side of the Bill. There are a lot of things that parents are asked to consent to, and it is quite reasonable that a school should explain why it wishes to use these systems and get general parental consent for it. If a parent wishes to say no, the school should make arrangements for that particular child to be excepted. I go along with that.
However, I really want the systems and rules that we put in place for schools to fit in with all the other rules that are there for asking parental consent for this, that and the other—whether it be religious observance, sex education or whatever else. These are taken seriously by schools and there are ordinary systems for them, the basis for which is single-parent consent. If two parents are involved and one objects, that nullifies the consent, but if you are seeking consent all you need is the consent of one parent. With a lot of schools, for parental arrangements it is really hard enough to get that; to go beyond that, in what seems to be an entirely ordinary matter for schools, does not seem sensible.
The other aspect that I want to look at is where facial recognition systems in particular, and other forms of ID, are going to be built into the systems that kids are using. If they are accessing Facebook from school—as many will be, because it is a common way of finding out information and communicating with other children who are collaborating on a project—there will be biometric information systems built into that software that will not be within the school’s power to disable. That will be within the individual child’s power to deal with, and the school will not have responsibility for it. If the school is using Windows 8—not yet out, but in beta form—there will be facial recognition systems built into that, so that when you sit down, your computer knows that it is you; if someone else sits down at your computer, it does not turn on. That, again, is a personally activated system. A school can disable that on school computers, but if the school is allowing children to access laptops and to take them home, as many secondary schools now do, then you would expect the child to be in control of the system and it would not be reasonable to require the school to impose or be responsible for the way in which biometric recognition systems are used without the school’s own systems. Some of the wording that we have at the moment crosses those boundaries.
On my individual amendments, Amendment 85 is completely garbled and I have no idea what it means. It may be that my noble friend’s officials have been able to decipher it, but I think it must have been my handwriting and I cannot now work out what the amendment means. I apologise to him and to the Committee for that.
Amendment 87 is a version of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. It is really saying that you must have single-parent consent and that an objection by the other parent nullifies that, but otherwise you only need one parent’s consent. Amendment 88 is another way of saying that, while the second part of Amendment 87 deals with the point that I made about some bits of biometric recognition being outwith the school’s control. Amendment 90 covers that same point, as does Amendment 92.
Amendment 94 is a worry about the wording in that part of the Bill. There are a lot of schools with these systems in place—several thousand of them, probably including the large majority of secondary schools and quite a lot of primaries. The wording of that part of the Bill might be used to allow a school not to go for retrospective parental consent. My view is that, if we are to have parental consent, all those schools that have the system should write to parents asking for their consent, rather than that consent being assumed or being taken to be too difficult—an exception being claimed under this subsection.
Amendment 97 reduces the age limit to 16, which I think is the common age within schools at which pupils should be allowed to take responsibility, while Amendment 98 questions the width of “equipment”, which in common parlance has animate as well as inanimate means. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel)
I have to tell your Lordships that, if Amendment 85 is agreed, I cannot call Amendments 86 to 88 because of pre-emption.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, we have four amendments in this group: Amendments 86, 89, 93 and 96. Amendments 86, 89 and 93 would simplify requirements for consent for the processing of biometric information. In particular, Amendment 86 would establish an opt-out rather than an opt-in system and remove the requirement for both parents to consent; instead, it would require notification from just one parent to withdraw consent. Amendments 86 and 89 remove the current provision allowing children of any age to override parental consent, and instead permit only children above the age of 16 to object. Amendment 93 makes consequential changes to requirements for parental consent while—although I will leave this to the end—Amendment 96 establishes a new duty upon schools to consult the views of teachers, parents and pupils before introducing biometric recognition systems into schools.
Our amendments in this group, as I have said, seek to simplify requirements around consent for schools and to prevent new rules from rendering costly, high-tech equipment in schools defunct. There are apparently no official figures on how many schools use biometric systems, but there are estimates. There was an estimate in a House of Commons Library note earlier this year that 30 per cent of secondary schools and 5 per cent of primary schools use them. Perhaps the Minister could tell us what he thinks the figures are.
The Home Secretary’s description of the Bill's provisions as a double lock on the processing of biometric information in schools is a tellingly accurate reflection of the regulatory bulwark that schools will in future come up against in order to use existing biometric processing systems. By requiring both parents of every child to provide written consent, the Government are creating a potential bureaucratic nightmare for schools that use these systems. In the words of the Association of School and College Leaders:
“What is proposed here is a very burdensome and bureaucratic new regulation that will address no significant problem. In short, it is exactly the kind of legislation that the present government promised to repeal, not enact”.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have Amendment 91 in this group, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Walmsley. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has obviously not been subject to Black Rod’s little talk about security in this place, which urges us all to wear our passes at all times—which I acknowledge I am not at this moment—rather than rely on people knowing who we are.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I know that we are all supposed to do that, but I am sure that the noble Baroness has seen, as I have, groups of guests wandering around with unidentifiable passes and noble Lords with their passes on back to front so that you cannot see even whether they are a Lord let alone who they are. Eyeball recognition by the doorkeepers is much more reliable and efficient, and is probably cheaper at the end of the day.
Baroness Hamwee
Perhaps I had better not continue down this route—I could, but it would take more time than the Committee might like to devote to it.
Another point on which I am perhaps not with the noble Lord is that every school knows what every child is up to all the time—I wish that were so. I am sure that we are going to hear from the Minister about the balance between privacy rights and sensible use of technology—I hope that we are not going to hear about feed-in tariffs, which seemed to stretch the analogy a bit far.
The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, did not know, on reflection, what his Amendment 85 was about. I have been in that situation as well, but that is not so on this amendment, against which I wrote “silence equals assent”—I think that it is the difference between opt-in and opt-out.
Before I come to the detail of my amendment, I wish to pick up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, about the technology being used in schools not being as sophisticated, if I can use that term, as technology used in other contexts. Can the Minister say how reliable the equipment is? That was the immediate question I had in response to the noble Lord’s comment.
My amendment does not contradict any of the other amendments that have been spoken to and is not inconsistent with the Bill. It provides that the relevant authorities, schools, academies and FE colleges should tell parents and children of their rights to refuse consent at least once in every academic year—in other words, it is about informed consent. The suggestion comes from the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, which supports the provisions in the Bill for ensuring that the institutions cannot process biometric data if consent is refused. I know that my noble friend will say a word about the convention rights.
I have been told by the Children’s Rights Alliance about research which shows that most children using these systems have not considered how long their fingerprints would be held for and they generally were not concerned. My response to that is that of course they would not—they are children and they do not necessarily think through all the implications of what they are being asked to agree to. Therefore explaining exactly what the subject matter is, both to them and their parents, is important. Other research—again, I am not surprised about this—shows that when schools have introduced a biometric system they have emphasised the benefits and not talked about the problems. All of this is natural human reaction.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, referred to the report of the Information Commissioner in 2008. The Information Commissioner made it clear that schools which collect data must be aware that children are data subjects and that they,
“should in the first instance be informed and consulted about the use of their personal data”.
This being the first principle of the Data Protection Act, he went on to say that,
“Fairness requires that schools ensure that pupils are informed about and understand the purpose for which their personal data is being processed”.
Our amendment would require that they are in a position to give consent—or, indeed, withhold it—but on an informed basis.
The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, this is an area which I have been thinking and worrying about because of the practicalities of it all. The part about children and schools is a well meaning and well intentioned effort to introduce legislation to make sure that children’s privacy is not breached and that no information is kept on them which could make things difficult for them in later life. It is very important that we should not do that.
However, as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said, we could try to make sure that the biometric information that is used for administrative purposes is not kept to evidential standards. In other words, the information could not be used in courts; it could not be linked up with the police computer; it could not be linked up elsewhere. That could be done simply by making sure that it is kept to a standard which is good enough to identify people for administrative purposes in populations of a few thousand, but once you raise it up to a national scale it does not work. For instance, under EU directives there have to be 13 matching points for a fingerprint to be admissible in evidence in court—that is, 13 out of 18. If only 10 or 11 were kept, which is probably quite sufficient for the school’s purposes, the information could never be linked with the main national databases. That might well be a way round it. That is contained within this group of amendments.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, the amendment simply provides for the turnover of pupils generally on an annual basis. I certainly did not intend it to be reworded every year. Information goes out from schools frequently on an annual basis. Sometimes, it sits in the bottom of a child’s bag.
While I am on my feet, the noble Earl may be comforted if the Minister can confirm that, for the purposes of these provisions, writing includes e-mails and other forms of electronic communication, which I suspect it does.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)
In the interests of time, I confirm that that is correct.
The Earl of Erroll
Thank you. I am sorry to have wasted the Committee’s time. In general, I think that a lot of these amendments are very useful, and they should be taken away and looked at hard by the Minister. We should be moving from an opt-in basis to an opt-out basis and avoiding adding costly burdens to the school system.
Baroness Walmsley
I support my noble friend Lady Hamwee on Amendment 91 and will make a few comments about other noble Lords’ comments.
Amendment 91 is necessary on the basis of children’s international convention rights: the privacy rights that a child has under Article 8 of the ECHR and Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In particular, Article 12 of the UNCRC says that a child has a right to be heard in decisions that affect them. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has made it very clear that, in order for a child to realise that right, it is necessary that,
“the child be informed about the matters, options and possible decisions to be taken and their consequences”.
Therefore, this amendment is very important especially since, under the proposals before us, the child has the right to refuse consent as well as the parents. It is important that the parents and the child are given the information that they need in order to make an informed decision.
Further to what the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said, I think that the reason why the child should have a final veto is because we are talking about very specific information about the child’s body—the fingerprints, the retina, the face or whatever. The child’s body belongs not to the parents but to the child. Therefore, it is very important that appropriate information is provided. Most children are very compliant and they like to co-operate with people who are in authority over them—their parents, their teachers and so on—so it is important to let them know that they do not have to do so. There may well be very good reasons why they should agree to co-operate, but they should also have the right not to do so if they wish.
Let me make just one or two other points. I listened with interest when the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said that schools should know where every child is physically at all times of the day, and I quite agree. However, I think that that should rely on the attention of the teachers, rather than on the likes of CCTV or electronic cards passing through doors. There is a danger that, if there is too much of this sort of thing—electronic ID cards or CCTV—teachers will come to rely on it too much and the teacher’s vigilance will be reduced. We really have to ensure that the technology tail does not wag the human rights dog.
Going back to what the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, said about letting people know every year, I agree that the information should be reworded if the system changes or is enhanced in any way, but otherwise I agree with my noble friend Lady Hamwee that it is not necessary to reword it every year. That can be done very easily, given that every school has a website or newsletter or something that gets sent out regularly to parents or to which the parents have access. As long as the school makes sure that, one way or another, the parents have that information in not too much gobbledegook or jargon, so that they can understand what the consequences of this system are, the school will have fulfilled its obligation under our amendment.
It is important to have the information in order to make an informed decision, and we all expect that. When we enter into any sales transaction or credit agreement or any kind of contract, we read the small print—or we need at least to be provided with the small print, so that we can tick the little box saying that we have read the terms and conditions, even when we have not done so. The point is that we have a right to have that information, and we really must be provided with it.
Lord Henley
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hamwee suggested that I should not talk about feed-in tariffs and solar panels, and I am tempted to follow her suggestion on that. I used to speak a great deal on those issues in my previous job, but I do not often do so now that I am in the Home Office. I am not sure that they are quite relevant to this debate. Possibly we ought to have a new award for relevance in amendments—we could call it the Lord Rosser award for relevance—and I could congratulate the noble Lord on winning the award on this occasion for bringing in feed-in tariffs and solar panels.
Lord Rosser
I am sorry if the Minister could not understand the point, but I quoted from one of the leading providers of this technology in schools who said that there had not been proper consultation or clear thinking about the consequences of the new policy. My point was that that lack of proper consultation or clear thinking about the consequences of a new policy seems to have become a feature of this Government, because that is precisely what happened with the new feed-in tariffs. I am sorry if the Minister cannot understand the relationship between the two.
Lord Henley
My Lords, as regards consultation, we consult till the cows come home in this department and every other department, and I am distinctly happy about the amount of consultation that has taken place on this issue. We will move on now from feed-in tariffs and solar panels and get on to the gist of the amendment.
My noble friend Lord Lucas is obviously not completely convinced that there is a need for parental consent at all, but accepts that he could be persuaded as long as, as I understand him, it is not overburdensome. That point is probably behind the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and others. By the way, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, did ask in passing for confirmation of the figures he used, and I can confirm, if I heard them correctly, that he is broadly right. Our figures are that some 30 per cent of secondary schools and some 5 per cent of primary schools are making some use of biometric systems for dealing with matters which, again one ought to stress, are largely related to access to school dinners, libraries and that sort of thing—so not major matters that affect them in other ways.
My noble friend obviously needs a degree of persuading about these matters. It is probably best if I go through the amendments in the appropriate order. I will deal with them in an order that I will take rather than as they are set out, but possibly I will leave Amendment 85, the first of my noble friend’s amendments, which even he described as being garbled; it is possibly best if I say little about that. I think my noble friend will understand why I take these a little out of order. I will start with Amendment 88.
Amendment 88 would have three consequences. First, it would obviously narrow the definition of who is a parent for the purposes of these provisions. Secondly, it would change the scope of the requirement for consent in that only one parent will need to consent. Thirdly, it seeks to introduce legal protection for schools and colleges where a child’s biometric information is processed beyond the control of that school or college. I will begin by addressing the first and third effects of that amendment.
For the purposes of these clauses, a parent means the child’s mother, father or any other individual who has parental responsibility for the child. Where it is not possible to obtain consent from any such persons, the parent is the person who cares for the child, unless the child is accommodated by a local authority or some voluntary organisation, in which case consent will be needed from that authority. My noble friend’s amendments obviously narrow this definition to include only individuals with parental responsibility. This would mean that, where there is no individual with parental responsibility who is able to consent, a school or college would be able to process a child’s biometric information without any person providing consent. I am sure that is not my noble friend’s intention, and he would probably want to adjust his amendment if he comes back to it—and I see my noble friend nod. The Government believe that all children, whatever their care arrangements, deserve the same level of protection in relation to the use of their personal information by a school or college. That is why we believe it is right that the definition of a parent goes wider than that suggested by my noble friend. Again I see my noble friend nod, and if he wants to come back to that he will no doubt amend his amendment.
The third element of this amendment seeks to provide protection for schools and colleges where a child’s data are processed outside of the control of the school or college. I know that my noble friend is concerned that these provisions should not apply when pupils access commercial websites or software systems that use face recognition to control access. I can give reassurance to my noble friend that the provisions in Clause 26 cover only the processing of biometric information that is carried out by, or on behalf of, the school or college.
Let me move on from Amendment 88 to the alternative approaches suggested by my noble friend in Amendments 85 and 87. It is also appropriate to consider here Amendments 86 and 89, from the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, which address a similar point and which I think my noble friend said he possibly preferred to his own. All those amendments seek to adopt a different approach to consent. At their most radical, they seek to replace the opt-in arrangement provided for in the Bill with an opt-out process. As a variant of this, they seek to provide for consent to be given by a single parent. Given the sensitive nature of the data involved, a positive decision should be made by both parents. This approach would afford them the opportunity to act on any concerns that they may have about the use of their child’s biometric information. In the vast majority of cases I would expect parents to discuss the issues between themselves and reach some agreement. As those of us who are parents will know, that is not always necessarily possible but, in the main, parents can reach that conclusion among themselves.
The Earl of Erroll
I want to go back to the business about being able to assume that there is implied consent, when it is very difficult to get it. Does the Minister not accept that inertia can be quite large among people and that, if you have to get positive consent, there will be a whole raft of parents who will not get round to doing it, for one reason or another? Therefore, you will suddenly find in these systems such a large failure to opt in because of inertia that they will be quite expensive and will have to be replaced by manual systems. That could put a huge burden on some of the schools, which would have to be paid for by the Government. Is it not much more sensible to move into a positive opt-out rather than a positive opt-in? I think that it will be much more burdensome than the Minister thinks. People are full of inertia, and you are not going to get that many people opting in.
Lord Henley
I accept that there can be a problem with inertia. It is what one might refer to as the “cheque is in the post” syndrome. People say that they are doing things and they do not. I suspect that we have got it right, but I am more than happy to have a further look at this if the noble Lord thinks that there will be concern over that. But this is something that schools are already doing a great deal about in terms of consulting or talking to their parents, and it is something that schools are used to. But perhaps we could talk about that at some later stage or between now and another stage.
Lord Rosser
The Minister has raised a number of issues, but could he confirm that under the Government’s proposals a child of five could say no, even though the parents had said yes, and it would be the view of the child of five that prevailed? If a 15 year-old agrees and one parent says no and one says yes, will the Government then seek to uphold the right of the 15 year-old? Also, he said that under my proposal the 15 year-old would be dragged kicking and screaming. Could he just confirm that school teachers are not allowed to use force against pupils, or has the government policy changed?
Lord Henley
Government policy has not changed, and the noble Lord will accept that the words I was using were metaphorical.
Lord Henley
Careless words they may be, as the noble Lord is saying, but I will go on using them. The simple fact is that he was suggesting you would force a child to be registered. How is he suggesting that that could be done other than by dragging the child kicking and screaming? We think that it is right at any age. I think that it would be rather unusual for a child of five to say that he was not going to do something when his parents insisted that it should be done.
Lord Henley
No, I will not give way, because I am answering the noble Lord. I can confirm that a child of any age can refuse; similarly, if a child of 15 wants to register but one of the parents refuses, it will not happen. We are trying to get the right balance.
The Earl of Erroll
I was only going to try to help the Minister by saying that all that would happen is that you would not get such a service. In other words, if it was a biometric lock that allowed access to a laboratory at certain times, the child just would not get into it. They would have to decide whether they wanted access or not. If it was about school meals, and the parents said that they would only get the meals that way, the child will just not get fed. They will soon come round.
Lord Henley
No, we are not looking for them to “soon come round”, as the noble Earl puts it. We are suggesting that schools should have to provide some alternative arrangement so that those who do not want to have biometric processes used can still get access to school meals or the library or whatever by some other means. It might be by a PIN or a swipe card. It does not have to be, but it is very convenient for a lot of them if they can put a finger down and get out their library book or get their meal. I hope that satisfies the noble Lord.
Baroness Walmsley
If the system is considerably enhanced, does the Minister accept that further information should be provided to parents?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I think this is what lawyers refer to as a question of fact and degree. If the system were, as my noble friend puts it, enhanced considerably and that involved a real change, then there would have to be further approval from the parents and children concerned. If it were a minor or technical change, I think that would not be the case. I shall leave it there, as it is a question of fact and degree as to whether there has been a proper change. I am in the hands of my noble friend Lord Lucas, but I hope that with those explanations of the various amendments he will feel able to withdraw his amendment. I think this debate has been very useful. We might not all agree totally but, as always, it is a question of getting the balance right on these matters, and I hope we have got it more or less right.
Baroness Hamwee
Am I right in understanding—and I apologise if this sounds as if I am trying to put words into the Minister’s mouth—that his concern is the bureaucratic provision of a requirement to make information available every year but he accepts that consent under these clauses would not properly be given unless the parent or child, as the case may be, is properly informed?
Lord Henley
Parents and children, to the extent appropriate for the child’s age, must be informed in the appropriate manner, and we want to get that right. We just do not think it needs to happen every year. If, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, there were substantive changes to what was being proposed, then further consent would be required, but we do not have to do that each and every year. Once should be enough for the duration of that child’s journey through that school.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am very sad indeed to learn that my noble friend’s equipment is entirely inanimate, but if for the purpose of legislation that is the meaning of the word, I am sure that having it in Hansard will suffice.
I am not at all sure that I understood the scope of “reasonable” as he expressed it. He said that the biometric system had to be run by or for the school, if I remember his wording exactly. I do not see where the boundaries of that are. If a bit of software provided by the school is being used on the school’s computers, why should that fall outside the prohibitions in this Bill just because it is a built-in component of a commonly available system? I would be very grateful if I could sit down with officials between now and Report to go through that.
I would also like to explore the scope of electronic means where we are looking at this consent. What forms of registering consent will be acceptable? This occurs as a general question. How is a school to know that a parent has given consent? How is it to know that it is the parent who has given consent? Schools do not have a stock of signatures to compare signatures against. If it is hard enough with something in conventional writing, how they are going to do it in electronic form I am not at all sure.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I have listened carefully to this debate. My experience is that electronic means are needed to be used by parents because an awful lot of messages from school end up in the washing machine.
Lord Lucas
Yes, my Lords, and in the ordinary way where something is not, as it were, being mandated by law in the way that is occurring in the Bill, that would seem sufficient. I would like to be sure that that ordinary common-or-garden communication that the noble Baroness describes will be acceptable under the Bill. Clearly, there is the matter of a verifiable electronic signature. When we came to introduce electronic means into the definition of writing it was with the concept of an electronic signature that was verifiable so that you could complete documents by electronic means, but that is not what is being talked about here. What we are talking about is getting an email that says, “Yes, I’m happy and so is Fred”. Is that consent by both parents, or is there some greater degree of identification required for electronic communications to be acceptable under this thing? Or is it just the reasonable best efforts of the school? I am not asking the noble Lord to respond now if he has prepared—
Lord Henley
If I may, I will just briefly respond to the noble Lord. Obviously, on the question of what is reasonable, great tomes have been written about reasonability in legal terms for years and years, and it is something that we want to discuss. In regards to, as he said, what forms of consent will be required I think he was quite right to take the intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, who as a mother and a grandmother speaks with great experience as to what happens to these messages and where they end up. However, if my noble friend would like to discuss this with myself and officials, that would probably be very useful, just to make sure that we can get it right between now and Report. I will certainly be more than happy to offer a meeting.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
Can the Minister clarify before the next stage of the Bill whether or not, in circumstances where a school were to decide to use this form of recognition for people entering and leaving the school premises, he thinks that there are many 14, 15 and 16 year-olds who would withhold consent in order that they can slip out in the lunch hour unknown?
Lord Henley
If it was a matter of getting in and out of the school, there would have to be some other provision—as with school meals and libraries and so on—by which they could get in and out. It would not just be by biometric data; it might be by a PIN or a smart card or whatever. But I will certainly look at the point made by the noble Baroness, who speaks, as I said, with such great experience in these matters.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for offering a meeting. There are clearly also other subjects to discuss: what form of records schools commonly have about parenting and guardianship arrangements; whether those are sufficient to deal with the requirements of the Bill; whether the Bill allows sufficient flexibility to deal with occasions when parents should not be communicated with; and how commencement is proposed. The Bill will introduce a considerable process of adjustment even if it is taken carefully. As the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, said, it threatens effectively to make these systems inoperable and therefore to require schools at considerable expense and in a great hurry to put other systems in place and make alternative arrangements. The way in which this section of the Bill is to be commenced is quite important.
I would be delighted to have a meeting; I would be delighted if the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, wanted to join me, because it is clear that we have common concerns about how this will work in practice and a common suspicion that what the Government are about is trying to ban these systems all together. However, for now and particularly with regard to Amendment 85, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Rosser
“(1) The Secretary of State must establish an independent inquiry into the use of surveillance camera systems in England and Wales.
(1A) Having considered the recommendations of that enquiry, and following a report on those recommendations to Parliament, the Secretary of State must prepare a code of practice containing guidance about surveillance camera systems.”
Lord Rosser
Amendment 99 would place a duty on the Secretary of State to commission a full independent inquiry into the use of surveillance camera systems in England and Wales, as recommended by the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, which also recommended statutory regulation. Amendment 110 would require a similar inquiry before any steps were taken to extend the code of practice into the private sector, as provided for by Clause 33(5)(k).
In its evidence to the Public Bill Committee, the Association of Chief Police Officers questioned the assertion that there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK, as is commonly cited, estimating that the figure was much closer to 1.8 million. Such wildly different estimates indicate the lack of information that exists on the extent and nature of closed-circuit television cameras and surveillance systems in this country. Where real evidence and information are lacking, misinformation will often move in to fill the gap.
The code of practice that the Government seek to introduce would place additional regulatory burdens on cash-strapped local authorities that could see a reduction in the use of CCTV technology and in the detection and apprehension of crime by the police. Yet a fundamental assessment of the extent and varying nature of CCTV use in the UK and its value has not been undertaken. My noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon, whose name is also on the amendment, visited Stevenage last month to see the hugely impressive system developed by the council there for the safety and security of residents. The idea that these surveillance systems should be targeted for further regulation is surprising.
The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, I suddenly realised about the extension into the private sector, which I had not really worried about. Presumably, that is going to mean door-entry systems, systems where you might be watching a childminding camera over the internet from somewhere else and security things which were in private use. It suddenly occurred to me that we have to worry about how far this could extend. That sudden thought came to my mind.
Lord Selsdon
My Lords, I have asked more questions on CCTV cameras in your Lordships’ House than anybody, I think, and I have been confused. The figure of 4.2 million was introduced twice by Labour Ministers in the past; there was also a code of good practice. It was estimated that there were 400,000 cameras in the London area alone. Some of the other estimates which led to private television cameras said that there was one for every three office buildings. I therefore support in principle the proposal that we should have more information. By my own knowledge from throughout the continent of Europe, we are the only country that has no knowledge of how many CCTV cameras we have, or of the latest technology that comes with them.
I will give your Lordships only one example. French policemen now have wonderful helmets, partly British designed, which have two cameras in the front and two in the back. As the French do not charge you for having a licence for a car, they make quite a lot of money out of some speeding offences but that technology is quite remarkable. I find it strange that we have not yet embarked on any programme to determine how many cameras there are and who they might belong to.
Lord Marlesford
My Lords, I should first declare an interest as I have CCTV cameras around my house. My main point is that the emphasis has perhaps very much been on what is to some extent a sort of fear and constraint: “Let’s find out how much”. I can see that, absolutely. However, CCTV is actually one of the great advances in protection, liberty and freedom and in having a safer society. I would always caution against standing against it. I recollect very well that many years ago when Citizens’ Band radio first came out, the Home Office in those days was very opposed to it. It reckoned that radio communications were for the broadcasting authorities, the military, the emergency services and itself. For a long while, people were illegally using CB radios but eventually the Home Office came round to recognising that CB radios, and any other intercom system by wireless, was a perfectly legitimate method of life. It is now in the ultimate in the mobile phone.
I can see that information is always interesting to get, but sometimes a survey such as this can be very expensive. There could be a commercial interest; no doubt, companies who supply mobile phone networks and, indeed, the hardware for mobile phones do a great deal of market research in order to maximise their sales all over the world. However, one wants to be quite careful before one takes something which has become an absolutely standard method of life and starts to spend a lot of money—public money in particular—in making great inquiries into it. I am happy for the commercial people to spend their money.
The example of the police in France was fascinating, and I had not heard about that. I do not think that we must do anything which stands in the path of progress in using modern technology. CCTV is not a particularly modern technology but it is an absolutely everyday technology. All of that said, there must of course be constraints on abuse or misuse of a technology. That is all I would like to say.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I can be quite brief on this. I start by agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that CCTV is a vital tool in fighting crime. I believe that the public and the police are generally supportive of its use. The provisions in the Bill build on that support and will, I hope, maintain public confidence in the use of CCTV. However, as we saw with Project Champion in Birmingham—the noble Lord will remember this—such confidence can be very rapidly undermined if CCTV systems are seen as spying on local communities, rather than as a tool that helps keep them safe and secure. Therefore, we propose that our code of practice—for which guidance is set out in Clause 29—will form a coherent framework that will enable the public to challenge any system operator over how and why they use CCTV. It will also assist operators in maximising the effectiveness of their systems.
Calling for an inquiry is not only a very expensive option, as suggested by my noble friend Lord Marlesford, at a time when we do not want to spend money on such things, but also adds very little other than delay to the proposed code of practice, which will help to ensure the right balance between protecting the privacy of the citizen and the security and safety of the public. Our approach is designed to make sure that those using CCTV do so appropriately, proportionately, transparently and effectively. I think that was broadly endorsed by the various responses to our consultation.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, the Minister helpfully referred to the responses. The Local Government Association develops guidance for member local authorities in many areas of activity. What was its view of this process for getting a code? Will it be fully involved in looking at how a code would work?
Lord Henley
I cannot at this stage remember precisely what the LGA’s response was. However, I can assure the noble Baroness—who, with her local government background, is presumably a distinguished former member of the LGA—that we will certainly want to listen to its views as we get that code of practice sorted out. The Secretary of State must prepare it, as set out in Clause 29. We want to make sure that it is appropriately, proportionately, transparently and effectively designed to ensure that the right approach is taken in dealing with these things and we get—dare I say it again—the balance exactly right. I believe that there is consensus that further regulation is necessary. However, there is also consensus that there should be no further delay in this matter.
I object to the amendment, although I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling it because it is useful to discuss the code, because we want to move ahead with getting that code of practice right. We will consult not just the LGA on that but a great many other bodies. However, having the inquiry, as suggested by the noble Lord’s amendment, would not achieve much. It might be that other inquiries will take place later but, for the moment, we want to get the code right and that is exactly what we will do. I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Selsdon
Maybe my noble friend could help me with something. I have asked previously how many cameras are registered. The answer was that all cameras should be registered with the Information Commissioner. I then asked how many cameras are registered with the Information Commissioner and the answer was none. Presumably my noble friend will be introducing a new form of commissioner who will register certain cameras. Could he perhaps explain the difference between the new system and what was meant to be the old system?
Lord Henley
The noble Lord has me there at the moment because I cannot assist him. We will be discussing further commissioners in due course. As regards the number that are registered, the noble Lord is ahead of me because he has seen that answered by one of my predecessors. I prefer to write to my noble friend about the details of his inquiry. Perhaps we can have further discussions between now and Report.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, the Minister said that his concern is about delay, and I will come back to that in a moment. If that is his concern, it does not explain why he does not accept Amendment 110, which relates to the private sector and those who may be covered by Clause 33(5)(k), since there is no intention at the moment of introducing it into these areas, and therefore it would be possible without causing a delay to agree to an inquiry there. I take it that in view of the fact that the Minister has not accepted it in relation to Amendment 110, it is a fundamental objection to an inquiry, not simply about delay, because Amendment 110 would not result in a delay.
Lord Henley
That is not the only aspect. There is also the cost. The noble Lord has not said who is going to pay for this inquiry.
Lord Rosser
If the Minister would care to tell me how much he thinks it is going to cost, perhaps we could discuss that issue and look at some of the other things that the Government are spending money on.
Our concern is that the code of practice—when it is drawn up, and we have not seen it yet—will act as a deterrent and prove to be something of an exercise in bureaucracy and additional cost. Additional cost is obviously an issue that is of considerable concern to the Minister. We do not sense that this Government look particularly favourably towards CCTV and that that may be one of the motives behind this proposal. We do not know, and the Minister has not told us, what the code will contain or what its impact will be on the use of CCTV. He has remained silent on that issue. The advantage of an inquiry is that it would show the extent or otherwise to which CCTV is being abused, and the Minister referred to that, so clearly he considers it an issue. It would also identify quite clearly the advantages and disadvantages of CCTV and what it has achieved, because some of us think that it has achieved a not inconsiderable amount. At least when the code was being drawn up, it would be drawn up against the background of a proper inquiry having taken place and looked at some of the allegations that are made. Therefore the code would be relevant and would address hard evidence instead of views or perceptions, and it would also make sure that the code would not in any way go over the top. That is why we are putting forward this proposal.
We note that the Minister has rejected it. He said that it was on grounds of cost as well as delay and had to agree that Amendment 110 would not cause any delay. Our argument is that when he draws up his code of practice, it may well lead to additional costs and a reduction of CCTV in areas where it would be beneficial for it to continue. However, we note what the Minister said. I will not pursue that matter any further at this stage, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 101, and there are other amendments in this group. My amendments are quite simple. They are probing amendments. Clause 29(3) provides that provision may, in particular, be made in the code about standards applicable to persons using systems or processing information. When I read that, I hesitated and wondered what was meant by “standards” in this context. My amendment proposes inserting a reference to operational practices because it seems to me that they are relevant, rather than the people who are using or maintaining the systems as individuals. I beg to move Amendment 100 in order to help me understand the clause a little better.
Lord Tunnicliffe
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 102, 106 and 112A. I thank the noble Lord for ensuring that the results of the first consultation on the proposed CCTV code of practice were published before the Committee stage in order to ensure proper scrutiny. The opposition amendments in this group seek to probe the Government’s thinking in this area and to tease out more detail of the shape of the final code now that they have reflected on the results of the consultation.
On Amendment 102, we are concerned that any future code should not force local authorities and police forces into disclosing the location of cameras. The consultation notes that some respondents,
“considered that there ought to be public access to a full list of camera locations and data retention periods”.
I note that the Government, although not committing to such a view, stated in response:
“The Government intends that the Code of Practice will increase transparency over the operation of surveillance cameras”.
It is right that, in some cases, CCTV locations are made public. Indeed, many cameras are clearly visible to the public and their visibility acts as an important deterrent to crime. However, it must be right that local authorities and police should reserve the right to conceal the location of other cameras, particularly those positioned in sensitive locations and deployed temporarily in order to apprehend criminals. There is also a real concern that, by disclosing the location of cameras and surveillance centres, there is a risk that these will become the targets of vandals and criminals wishing to prevent the detection of crime. Will the Minister give a clear assurance to the Committee that any future code of practice will not include a blanket requirement to disclose the location of surveillance cameras?
Amendment 106 probes the Government’s intentions with respect to the code of practice in relation to CCTV and ANPR footage that is used as evidence in court. Clause 33 currently provides:
“A court or tribunal may, in particular, take into account a failure by a relevant authority to have regard to the surveillance camera code in determining a question in any such proceedings”.
In fact, this would appear to be the only real enforcement tool at the disposal of the Government. Local authorities will be required to have regard to the surveillance camera code but they will commit no criminal or civil offence if they fail to adhere to it. The implication is that the Government envisage that local authorities and police forces will feel compelled to comply with the code for fear that otherwise evidence provided by their cameras will not be admissible in court.
This view is reinforced by the response to the consultation in which the Government note that the failure to comply can be tested in judicial proceedings. It is one thing to conclude that evidence should be inadmissible on the basis that it violates requirements under the Data Protection Act; however, it is quite another to jeopardise whole trials on the basis that, for instance, the location of the camera in question was not adequately disclosed to the public. What assurances can the Minister give to the Committee that enforcement of the code in this way will not lead to the police being hamstrung in their use of key evidence derived from CCTV cameras?
Finally, Amendment 112A seeks again to probe the Government’s intentions with regard to ensuring that there is clarity for local authorities on the overlap of existing requirements under the Data Protection Act and those under the proposed code of practice. This point was raised by a number of sources when the Bill was debated in another place. Indeed, the Information Commissioner has himself expressed concerns about the implementation of the code in this area. In a letter to my noble friend Lady Royall on 22 November the Information Commissioner noted:
“There is potential overlap between these provisions, including my role, and those set out in the bill relating to the Secretary of State’s Code of Practice and the activities of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner”.
In his memorandum to the Public Bill Committee, the commissioner goes further, stating that,
“there is a risk that regulation becomes frequently fragmented, confusing and contradictory, especially if commissioners take different approaches … there will be overlaps in their responsibilities running the risk that commissioners may adopt differing interpretive approaches and guidance on each other’s statutory provisions”.
The Government’s consultation recognises that there is an issue to be dealt with, and states:
“We shall take note of the concern expressed by respondents in the way we develop the role of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner and how this interacts with that of the Information Commissioner and the Surveillance Commissioners”.
To prevent unnecessary bureaucratic burdens and confusion in the public sector, I ask the Minister to take this opportunity to expand on how the Government aim to ensure maximum clarity and minimum overlap in the roles and requirements of the two commissioners.
Lord Henley
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hamwee moved Amendments 100 and spoke to Amendment 101, and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, spoke to Amendments 102 and 112A.
In the amendment that we have just dealt with, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, complained that we knew nothing about the code. Obviously, we do not know about the code at this stage because it has not yet been prepared. Some detail is given in Clause 29 about what the code may include particular provision about; we lay it out in subsection (3), which says:
“Such a code may, in particular, include provision about”,
and then goes from paragraphs (a) to (i). Subsection (4)(a) then provides that such a code also,
“need not contain provision about every type of surveillance camera system”,
and subsection (4)(b) says that it,
“may make different provision for different purposes”.
We have amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, dealing with that.
I start by dealing with my noble friend’s amendments, which seek to extend the list of matters that may be covered by the surveillance code of practice. As I have said, subsection (3) is intended to set out a very broad framework in the Bill for which issues may be covered in the code of practice. We have deliberately adopted a very flexible framework so that the code of practice can be revised over time in the light of experience and to reflect the wide range of circumstances in which surveillance cameras are used. For these reasons, the list of matters that may be included in the code is not intended to be prescriptive. Nor is it intended to be an exhaustive or exclusive list. The nature of such non-exhaustive lists is that they inevitably attract debate as to why this or that matter has not been included. Certainly, on first seeing Amendments 100 and 101 from my noble friend, I was unsure what she had in mind. However, I am grateful for her explanation that she wanted a degree of reassurance about what might be included. She also expressed concerns about standards and how they could concern not only the competence of an operator of CCTV but whether the operator was a fit and proper person. Those standards might also apply to operational processes but the code is intended to provide a degree of advice, rather than absolute prescriptive requirements. With that reassurance in mind, I hope that the noble Baroness will accept that, as we develop the code further, we can consider her points and make sure we get it right.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, it may be helpful if I address this issue now so that we do not need to come back to it later. The wording is “standards applicable to persons”. Is the Minister saying that this refers to the standards used by persons but it is not applicable to them? If anything, it is about them: it is not who they are but how they work and the standards that they use. It reads as though it is much more personal.
Lord Henley
I think that my noble friend has got it right. If she has not, I will certainly write to her. The point I was trying to get across is that the standards apply to the process and not just to the person. I expect my noble friend is a better draftsman than I am—I give her an assurance that I did not draft this myself—but Parliamentary draftsmen are a law unto themselves. If we have not quite covered the point that my noble friend is making, we will look at it.
I was slightly surprised that Amendment 102 was spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, but I appreciate that it is a probing amendment and seeks to find out what we are trying to do. I repeat that the Government, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said, are committed to supporting the use of CCTV and ANPR—automatic number plate recognition—as very effective crime-fighting tools and to their being used with the support and confidence of the public. That is the important point we must remember. We need the support and confidence of the public, and that is why I mentioned the experience of Birmingham when debating an earlier amendment.
Such support will be dependent on transparency on the part of the system operator about the purpose of their camera deployment and the area in which the cameras are being used. Not only would Amendment 102 send a signal that operators can be more covert about their use of CCTV but, more fundamentally, it is likely to run contrary to the Data Protection Act. The Information Commissioner’s existing CCTV code of practice is very clear on the general requirement to let people know that they are an entering an area with CCTV coverage. The guidance states:
“The most effective way of doing this is by using prominently placed signs at the entrance to the CCTV zone and reinforcing this with further signs inside the area. This message can also be backed up with an audio announcement, where public announcements are already used, such as in a station. Clear and prominent signs are particularly important where the cameras themselves are very discreet, or in locations where people might not expect to be under surveillance. As a general rule, signs should be more prominent and frequent where it would otherwise be less obvious to people that they are on CCTV”.
As I said earlier, we saw in Birmingham that public confidence can very rapidly be undermined if the police and others are seen to be imposing these systems without the appropriate public consultation or support.
That is not to say that there will not be occasions when covert surveillance needs to be conducted using CCTV. We are not ruling that out. However, in such cases the surveillance will need to be properly authorised under RIPA. Clearly, in such cases there would not be the same expectation that the location of the relevant cameras was publicly disclosed.
On Amendment 106, I appreciate that it stems from a concern that justice might be prevented or denied in a criminal trial where the defence argued successfully that a small technical breach of the code is sufficient to demonstrate that CCTV or ANPR evidence is flawed and not of a sufficient evidential standard. From that starting point it might be possible to construct a scenario where, in an attempt to invalidate that evidence against their clients, lawyers would be falling over the detail of a relevant authority's performance against the code and seeking auditable records of any decisions made. We believe that that evidence may be very valuable in any trial, but it is rarely going to be the only source of evidence. I find it difficult to foresee a scenario where a case would be dismissed just because CCTV evidence is argued as inadmissible due to the system operator being in some way non-compliant with the code. The amendment should be seen in the context of a code that is intended to be a reference document to help ensure that surveillance cameras are used proportionately and effectively but which does not impose absolute requirements on operators. Against that backdrop, we do not believe that the provisions will give rise to the fears expressed by the noble Lord.
On Amendment 112A, I have a degree of sympathy for the spirit that underpins it. It seeks to ensure coherence between the requirements in the surveillance camera code and the Data Protection Act and I can see why there might be concerns about overlapping guidance in this area. Those concerns are precisely the reason why we are proceeding with the development of the code through close discussion with the Information Commissioner and his office. The Information Commissioner is keen to work with us to help ensure that there is effective regulation of surveillance cameras with clarity and coherence for both system operators and the public. I believe that that work will ensure that not only the code of practice but the roles and responsibilities of the two commissioners fit together and everyone can be directed to the right place for guidance, information and advice.
I think that I have dealt with the point raised by my noble friend Lady Hamwee, and I hope I have dealt with the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. I hope that my noble friend will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Lucas
Lord Lucas
My Lords, the amendments in this group are intended to ask a short trio of questions about how line 36, which is about the admissibility of evidence, will work. First, I want to be sure that it covers civil as well as criminal proceedings because an awful lot of surveillance camera evidence is used in, for instance, parking ticket or traffic enforcement, which are civil proceedings. It is important that if there are rules and regulations being passed about how these cameras should be used, they and the guidance should be equally effective in dealing with traffic enforcement as in dealing with a mugging.
Secondly, if one goes by not general, but certainly frequent, local authority practice, local authorities will rely in civil cases on the fact that most people do not appeal, so the case never comes to court. People pay their fines. Knowing that whenever a particular breach of the code comes to the tribunal the local authorities lose their case, they will none the less continue enforcing because they are losing only 1 or 2 per cent of revenue and the rest of the people are paying up as usual. What the guidance in the code is supposed to do is nullified by the fact that there is no mechanism for spreading the opinion of the tribunal more widely than the individual cases which reach it.
Amendment 104 is intended to propose such a mechanism so that a tribunal can say, “No, you have to stop this. We have seen this five times already and each time we have found for the appellant. You must cease enforcing until you have put this right. We will not allow you to issue any more tickets on the basis of something which we consider to be an unreasonable breach of the code”. The other end of it is that where a tribunal has found a local authority to be in frequent breach of the code and has on each occasion found for the appellant, none the less the local authority will have extracted a very large amount of money out of other people who have not appealed because there is a very substantial disincentive to appeal. If you lose an appeal, you double your fine. There is also a large amount of time taken up in the process of appeal.
I would like to see some mechanism where a tribunal can say to a local authority, in particular, or to other people who are seeking to use camera evidence as the basis of fines, that they must repay not only the appellant but all the other people on whom penalties have been imposed on the basis of the practice that the tribunal disapproves of. I beg to move.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for explaining and introducing his amendments. I recognise that he is focusing on the specific use of surveillance camera technology, particularly in its use for enforcement of parking and traffic regulations. It is probably worth me pointing out for the benefit of the Committee that the surveillance camera code of practice is not intended to include any speed camera technology. I know that my noble friend—
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am not talking at all about speed camera technology.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I was just about to say to my noble friend that I know that he was not talking about speed camera technology at all. It was just for the benefit of the rest of the Committee. I thought it was an appropriate point for me to make that clear, in case anybody else might not be as clear as my noble friend is on this matter.
I refer first to my noble friend’s Amendment 103, which, as he has explained, seeks to clarify the drafting of Clause 33(3). I believe that the meaning of that subsection is already clear, as “such proceedings” unambiguously refers back to “criminal or civil proceedings” in subsection (2); we simply do not need to repeat those words in subsection (3).
My noble friend’s Amendment 104 suggests that this Bill takes away the right to seek redress where a court has ruled that the code of practice has been breached. We believe this would have significant implications for litigants. In the context of civil proceedings—just to be clear, for example, we might be talking here of someone seeking to enforce the payment of parking charges—a claimant should be able to present all relevant evidence in support of his or her case. Given that the surveillance code of practice will set out guidance rather than rigid requirements for the operation of surveillance camera systems, it would in our view be disproportionate to prevent, as a matter of course, CCTV evidence being presented where a court or tribunal has ruled that there has been a breach of the code.
Clause 33(4) makes it clear that the court should have discretion in taking into account a failure by a relevant authority to have regard to the surveillance camera code in determining a question in any such proceedings. In the context of criminal proceedings, the ramifications of the amendment in terms of the overall fairness of the process are potentially more significant. The effect of the amendment might be to exclude key prosecution evidence or evidence that might exonerate the accused. Our general approach, as I have already explained, should be to leave decisions about the admissibility of CCTV evidence to the court or tribunal in question.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for that answer, particularly the sudden inspiration which struck her at the end and which gave me great comfort so far as Amendments 104 and 105 are concerned, which I agree were pushing it a bit. However, I still have concerns on Amendment 103.
I agree that Clause 33(3) refers back to Clause 33(2), but the latter refers to the acts of people who are running surveillance cameras, not to the acts of people who are caught on surveillance cameras. It is not clear to me that the inference that she suggested should be imported into Clause 33(3)—that the civil and criminal proceedings in Clause 33(2) apply—is justifiable, given that they refer to completely different sets of court cases. One is cases taken against people who are using cameras and the other is cases against people who are caught on camera. I should be very grateful if the Minister could write to me to answer that point in detail if she does not have an answer in front of her now.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I would be very happy to take away the points that my noble friend has raised and will, of course, write to him in due course.
Baroness Randerson
“( ) any government department or any other public body or authority in receipt of money provided by Parliament,”
Baroness Randerson
My Lords, in moving Amendment 107, I will speak also to Amendment 109 in my name and to Amendment 108 in the name of my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Hamwee, as these amendments really provide a set of options. These probing amendments seek to ensure that the range of bodies that will be subject to the code is clarified by the Government. They also seek to find out whether there are intentions to widen the range of bodies involved beyond the local authorities and the police, as specified in the Bill. I realise that Clause 33(5)(k) gives the Secretary of State power to widen the scope. This may indicate a gradualist approach on the part of the Government, which I will touch on later.
Amendment 107, which gives the widest interpretation of the options provided by these three amendments, suggests that any body in receipt of public money should be subject to the code. Among many others, that would encompass quangos, a host of arm’s-length bodies, schools, colleges and universities, plus the devolved Administrations and their associated bodies. It might be argued that, once you introduce a code for some bodies, there is no logical way of dividing up public bodies and quasi-public bodies between those that should follow the code and those that need not do so. The amendment would require all bodies in receipt of public money to abide by the code.
Amendment 109 gives a detailed description of a variety of educational institutions, hence narrowing down the first tranche of bodies to be subject to the code as a possibility for the Government to pursue. Thus amended, the Bill would apply not just to local authorities and the police but to educational institutions as well. Of course, the Bill does apply to schools in other respects.
Amendment 108 has raised concerns, because schools will not be required to have regard to the code of practice on the use of CCTV in the same way as is required of other organisations. Research done for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in 2008 found that 85 per cent of teachers worked in schools with CCTV. I venture to suggest that, with that research now three years old, the percentage is now probably higher. Of those questioned, while 98 per cent of teachers believed that the cameras were there for security purposes and to monitor vandalism, more than half of them said that the cameras were there to monitor the behaviour of children in school. In other words, there was confusion in the minds of the teachers themselves as to the proper purpose of the cameras. More than three-quarters of the teachers questioned reported that cameras were being used at school entrances, which is understandable. Worryingly, 10 per cent said that the cameras monitored the school toilets.
Although anyone who has ever been involved in education will know that toilets can be a good place to hang out if you are trying to avoid a lesson, it is very concerning that the privacy of young people is being infringed on in this way. As the Government say, I strongly believe that there is a place for CCTV in our lives; it has an important role to undertake. But the issue of proportionality has to come into it. The same research showed that it was reported in February this year that one school in Coventry had installed 112 CCTV cameras. To my mind, that shows that CCTV use can go over from the reasonable to the unreasonable.
The question that I come to in relation to this amendment is why the cameras are there in schools. For whose safety is it? Is it to provide evidence of breaches of school discipline or to provide for the safety of the pupils? Is it to provide for the safety of the staff? The inclusion of schools and education institutions in general is very important to provide clarity in this respect.
When I first read the Bill, I was very surprised by the very limited reach of the code specified in Clause 33. In my experience as an elected Member, before I became a Member of this House, I came across two very serious cases of abuse of CCTV camera surveillance. One was on the property of the National Assembly for Wales and the second in a hall of residence in a university. The abuse in both cases was the misuse of CCTV cameras to spy into bedrooms—in one case in the hall of residence and in the other case in a neighbouring residential property. The cause of the problem here was insufficient training and supervision of the staff involved, and access to the cameras and recordings being far too freely available. We have in these amendments singled out educational institutions in particular, because this is where young people are particularly and persistently vulnerable.
I was also involved in the production of some legislation in the National Assembly on provision of school transport, which included a requirement for CCTV cameras on school buses. This sparked a considerable debate and deep thought about the use to which the footage could be put and who should have access to it. Was the CCTV camera requirement there to protect children or the drivers? Was it there to encourage good behaviour on the buses? Supposing that a child was accused of shoplifting at a particular time in the afternoon and could prove that he was on the school bus at that time, because of the use of the CCTV footage, would that be a legitimate use of the CCTV footage? That is the kind of complexity that we are moving into.
The issue of which body should be subject to the code was raised by the respondents to the Home Office consultation, who asked for a definition of public and semi-public space. Can the Minister address the issue of how far the Government envisage that this code will be extended to bodies other than those specified at this moment? If the Government adopt the incremental approach which paragraph (k) seems to suggest, how long do they envisage it will be before the impact of the code is fully felt? I beg to move.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I support this group of amendments, but with a degree of confusion as to just what the Bill provides. If one looks at Clause 29, which introduces the code of practice, there is no reference there at all to relevant authority. There are two references in subsections (3)(f) and (3)(g) simply to “persons” operating a CCTV system. The more my noble friend introduced the group of amendments, the more I wondered why on earth this code is not applicable to all users of CCTV systems, be they public, private or whatever. Why, for example, in a shopping mall with endless numbers of CCTV cameras should they not be subject to the code requirements, just as any of the relevant authorities as defined in Clause 33 are? My noble friend the Minister might like to ask her officials whether Clause 29 was indeed drafted to apply to all those operating CCTV systems, and why Clause 33 itself refers twice to relevant authorities but in subsection (2) simply refers to a
“failure on the part of any person to act in accordance with any provision”,
of the code.
Lord Tunnicliffe
My Lords, the dilemma in front of us is basically to do with the application of CCTV, its value and the safeguards related to its value. I have peculiar experience of this, having headed up an organisation which had probably one of the largest CCTV installations in the UK. I have to say it was introduced before anybody thought about any sort of code, and we built up practice. Our experience was that the benefits massively outweighed the disadvantages. Our other experience was that acceptance by the general public simply grew with time. In London, people are used to CCTV on transport systems, in public spaces and so on. We think that the benefits are enormous.
We are not against the general concept of introducing a code, but we have all made it clear that we think the way this code is being introduced is wrong. The right thing to do is to have an inquiry to understand the extent of the problem, to start working up criteria and so on. However, if the Government insist on introducing this code more rapidly than that, we would be against its extension to all publicly funded areas and to schools and colleges. This is not because we are against extension of the code—as has been rightly pointed out, there are many privately owned CCTV cameras that could sensibly fall within a comprehensive code. What we are against is the extension of that code until the right amount of experience has been gained and investigation has taken place. Otherwise, these crucial areas, particularly schools and colleges, where CCTV is so valuable, will be burdened with a bureaucratic nightmare until we achieve a code that gets the right balance of being bureaucratically light while achieving the effective objectives of public engagement and acceptance. Therefore, in this Bill at this time we do not support these amendments.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I shall start by picking up where the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, left off, and by making the point that there is a lot of support for CCTV in this country. As my noble friend has already made clear today, the Government are certainly not in any way trying to restrict the use of CCTV through the introduction of this Bill. We are trying to introduce a code so that the use of CCTV is clear, and that where it is used the public have clarity in their understanding of its purpose.
I shall address, first, my noble friend’s Amendment 107, which proposes extending the code to all public bodies in receipt of money provided by Parliament. Given the incremental approach that we are adopting, we are not persuaded that the duty to have regard to the code should apply more widely than to local authorities and the police from the outset. All operators of public space CCTV are subject to the requirements of the Data Protection Act. We see local authorities and the police as the operators of publicly owned CCTV systems in public space, and as the bodies who are well placed to set the example for standards of operation. They frequently work in partnership with other CCTV operators and we see their behaviour as a powerful driver for positive change elsewhere.
To place a duty to have regard to the code on every publicly funded body from the outset would be premature. We should see how the code beds in and, drawing on the advice from the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, consider in due course whether the duty should be extended and, if so, to which bodies. Clause 33 contains a provision to enable the duty to have regard to the code of practice to be extended to other bodies by means of secondary legislation, so we do not need to settle this question now. We will not hesitate to make use of this provision if we deem it necessary and beneficial. Any order made to this end will be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, and so will need to be debated and approved by both Houses.
At this point, I should refer to the question asked by my noble friend Lord Phillips about the period of review of the code. Subject to any further advice that I receive, I refer him to Clause 35, which refers to reports by the commissioner. Subsection (2)(b) makes it clear that the commissioner will be required to report every 12 months. On that basis, I suspect that any advice or proposals that he might want to make about the extension of the code would therefore be covered in his reports.
I turn now to my noble friend’s Amendment 109, which refers explicitly to educational establishments—schools, colleges and universities. I accept that the use of CCTV in schools and colleges is a potentially emotive issue for a variety of reasons. Some of the examples that my noble friend outlined certainly illustrate that point most clearly. As with any other establishment, we would expect any decision to install CCTV in an educational establishment to be very carefully considered, and the reasons for so doing tightly defined. The new code is intended to assist with these considerations. While we are not proposing that schools be covered by the code at the outset, it is there for all organisations that wish to install CCTV to use and be guided by in determining the purpose of that CCTV, precisely as the noble Baroness says. It is very important that, if a school introduces cameras, it should be clear about why it is choosing to do that.
The public consultation that we carried out earlier this year received over 100 responses, which are available on the Home Office website. Analysis of the responses received found that comments on the use of CCTV in schools were minimal. While there were some respondents who argued that the code should be made mandatory for all operators, none put forward a specific case for compliance with the code to be made mandatory for schools. Similarly, in relation to the amendment of my noble friend Lady Randerson regarding higher education institutions, there were no calls in the public consultation relating to universities or further education colleges and there are no specific concerns that we are aware of.
I assure your Lordships that the detail of the code will be developed in consultation with interested parties and, as part of that dialogue, we will consider whether any issues associated with surveillance camera systems within schools or healthcare settings require specific reference within it. When using CCTV on their premises, schools, colleges, universities and indeed all public bodies—including government departments—must adhere to the requirements in the Data Protection Act. Noble Lords will be well aware of the existing powers of the Information Commissioner to enforce compliance through a regulatory action policy.
There are therefore already safeguards in place for the privacy of students and the wider public. We trust the proprietors of schools, colleges and universities and their heads of institution to comply with those requirements, and for schools, where appropriate, to consult with parents on any deployment of CCTV.
I hope that by giving the assurance that we recognise the importance and value of CCTV; by outlining that the introduction of the code is to provide some clarity in terms of its use; and by explaining that there is an option to extend the code beyond the relevant authorities outlined already in the Bill but that we will not do so prematurely, I have addressed all the points that have been raised by noble Lords in the debate today. I hope my noble friend will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Randerson
I thank my noble friend for that answer. I realise that every organisation concerned is subject to the Data Protection Act, but the point about the code is that one prevents the kind of problems to which I referred; one prevents breaches of the Data Protection Act by encouraging public bodies to follow good practice, behaviour and procedures.
I ask the Minister to give further consideration to the issue of schools and educational institutions. She referred to the lack of response in the consultation on the issues associated with schools, but perhaps the Government may consider that in many people’s minds when they talk about local authorities, they encompass schools as well. However, in the modern world that is less and less so.
It is clear from the legislation that the Government are not including schools at this stage but I would ask them to give further consideration to the matter. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Geddes)
My Lords, before calling Amendment 111, I must point out that there is an error in the Marshalled List—the omission of the vital word “from”. It should read:
“Page 26, line 2, leave out ‘from’ beginning to”,
and so on.
Baroness Hamwee
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I am grateful for that clarification. Under Clause 34, the Secretary of State is to appoint the Surveillance Camera Commissioner. My amendment proposes that the appointment instead be made by Her Majesty by Letters Patent. The reason for this amendment is that the Information Commissioner, to whom we have referred several times this afternoon and previously in Committee, and who before holding this office was in a previous incarnation the Data Protection Commissioner and before that the Data Protection Registrar, is appointed through the process which I propose here. The roles of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner and the Information Commissioner seem to be complementary; there is a lot of common ground and certainly they have quite a lot of mutual interest. My amendment seeks to understand the distinction in the modes of appointment. Are the Government seeking to create some sort of hierarchy or, briefly, why is there a difference?
Before he had to leave the Committee the Earl of Erroll came over and said that he supported my amendment. Possibly his support is greater than the thrust of my amendment, at any rate at this stage, but I thought I should report that to the Committee. I beg to move.
Lord Henley
I am grateful to my noble friend for her amendment and for her explanation of what it is about. I am also grateful that she assured us that she had the support of the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, who I think has some very important hereditary role in Scotland which probably influenced him in his view of insisting that this should be a matter for Her Majesty rather than the Home Secretary.
I will make just a few remarks about the role of the commissioner which I hope satisfy her concerns. It is a role which will be pivotal in promoting first the new code of practice, and in assessing its effectiveness and impact. In particular, the commissioner is charged with encouraging compliance with the code, reviewing how it operates, and providing advice on the code. Precisely how the commissioner decides to fulfil those duties will be a matter for him, but it will involve an impartial and independent assessment of all the issues. Independence is something we want to stress.
As we have already made clear, as did my honourable friend when he debated these matters in another place, our intention is to combine the new role of the commissioner with that of the existing Forensic Science Regulator. The existing regulator, Mr Andrew Rennison, was appointed by the previous Government as the interim CCTV regulator. He therefore already has considerable grounding in this area, and he has established a wide range of contacts with interested parties. That will be helpful in his new role of promoting and monitoring the code of practice.
At the same time his work as the forensic regulator will provide a useful complement, as well as much relevant background, in the area of seeking to improve the consistency of use and standards of performance of CCTV. Improving the evidential value of camera usage and images is also an important area, and one which cuts across both roles.
At the moment—and I will come on to this—I appreciate that sometimes these matters are dealt with by the Home Secretary and sometimes by the Crown. However, I do not see the need to depart from the normal practice, that is that the appointment is made by the relevant Secretary of State, in this case my right honourable friend. As with any other statutory office holder, we would expect the Surveillance Camera Commissioner to discharge his responsibilities independently of ministers and without fear or favour.
As with other public appointments, the appointment process will be overseen by the Public Appointments Commissioner and from April 2012 it will be regulated by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments code of practice. This will be the case whether the appointment is made by my right honourable friend or by Her Majesty on advice from the Government.
The amendment would not actually provide a materially different outcome in terms of independence of the officeholder. I appreciate that my noble friend has drawn a comparison with the Information Commissioner, suggesting that there is some sort of hierarchy between different appointments as to who makes them. However, that office has a somewhat wider remit and plays a key role in regulating the Government itself. The additional assurance provided by the appointment by Her Majesty is therefore justified in that case but I do not think it is warranted here, given the somewhat narrower focus of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, and would not lead to a different outcome.
I hope that that assurance is sufficient for my noble friend. I assure her that we will want a robust, independent commissioner dealing with surveillance cameras and that the appointment process provided for in the Bill will secure that outcome. Although I appreciate that there are occasions when it is appropriate that Her Majesty should make the appointment on the advice of the Government, there are other occasions when it is just as appropriate that it should be by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. I hope therefore that my noble friend will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, that response is helpful, particularly the comment about the Information Commissioner regulating the activities of the Government. Of course, the Minister will understand that we think that the way the Government use cameras should also be regulated, as in my noble friend’s Amendment 107. I accept that there will not be any difference in reality in the process, except for that last stage. It is important to have had the assurance that there is not a hierarchy in importance or in powers. I was concerned that there should not be, given the potential mutual interest—as I said, it is not quite an overlap—and I think we have had that. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
“Commissioner’s report on alteration or replacement
As soon as the Commissioner considers it practicable but in any event not later than three years after the date provided by section 35(2)(a)(i)—(a) the Commissioner must prepare a report about the alteration or replacement of the code which shall in particular include reporting on extending the code to operators not initially subject to it;(b) the Secretary of State must lay a copy of the report before Parliament; and(c) the Commissioner must publish the report.”
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, this amendment proposes that the commissioner should, within three years, prepare a report about the extension of the code to other operators. We have already touched on this in referring to Clause 33. My noble friend Lord Phillips, who has been taxing me with notes asking me to justify the drafting of this section, which is not my responsibility, asked under a previous amendment not about the extension of the code but about which operators were subject to it. He was asking why this chapter starts by appearing to be quite general and then becomes more restrictive once we get into the detail of Clause 33. He is nodding; I hope that I am interpreting him correctly.
My understanding of this is that because, under Clause 33(5)(k), more persons can be added to those who come within the definition “relevant authority”, Clause 29 and the succeeding clauses are drafted in that slightly wider way. I share my noble friend’s concern that “relevant authorities” should extend to a wider group of operators than are listed in Clause 33(5)(a) to (j).
A similar question was asked during the Committee stage in the Commons, and the Minister, James Brokenshire, said:
“The report—
this is the regular report to the commissioner—
“will be an instructive and formal means for the commissioner to telegraph clear recommendations about the code, its application and whether it is achieving its intended objectives”.—[Official Report, Commons, Protection of Freedoms Bill Committee, 26/4/11; col. 364.]
My amendment takes the matter wider to those who operate the code.
It occurred to me only during this debate that it will be helpful to have—and I am sorry to be technical, but the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, will probably tell me that I am not accurate in this question—reassurance that the sui generis rule does not apply and that by having a list that is very specific we are not stuck to those organisations and persons who are similar to those listed in paragraphs (a) to (j) of Clause 33(5). Clearly there is concern that a much wider group of persons—private companies do not quite come within this—and all operators of CCTV, those who run shopping malls, for instance, should not be brought within the scope of the code. We know how the concerns have started, but the more we talk about it, some of us feel that there should be a code that is observed by all operators. While I understand that getting experience of the use of the code under one’s belt might be a good thing, I think that we would like to know that the position will be reviewed in fairly short order. I beg to move.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I would just like to add a few points to those made very effectively by my noble friend Lady Hamwee. I regret to ask the Minister some questions, because it always seems churlish to spring technical questions upon a well meaning Minister, but I hope he gets advice from his rear quickly.
First, Clause 34 “Commissioner in relation to code” states that in Clause 34(2)(b) that the commissioner has the function of,
“reviewing the operation of the code”.
I agree with my noble friend Lady Hamwee that that does not, on the normal reading of those words, extend to consideration of the exercise of power to specify new bodies to be caught by the code under Clause 33(5)(k).
Secondly, will the Minister confirm that there is nothing in Clause 35 “Reports by Commissioner” that appears to authorise the commissioner in making reports to consider the point of extension of the code, which I would have thought justifies Amendment 113?
Finally, all those arguments would count for nought if in Clause 33(5)(k) the proper construction of “any person” is to confine “any person” to bodies comparable to “relevant authorities”. My own view is that it does not. In view of the opaqueness of the drafting of this part of the Bill and, as I said earlier, the fact that Clause 29 refers twice to “persons” but not at all to relevant authorities, I feel we need to be very clear of our ground here. In my humble view, there is a lot more concern about the operation of CCTV cameras by private interests than by public ones. I cannot think, for example, that the Sub-Treasurer of the Inner Temple is likely to abuse the CCTV cameras within his or her purview, but I am afraid I can foresee that some private operators might get up to things that are extremely undesirable.
The end of all that is whether the Minister can say to us now that he will take this away, look at it and if necessary bring forward his own amendment at the next stage of the Bill. I hope he might do that. I apologise again for springing this rather nasty group of questions upon him, but I was unprepared for the debate as it has evolved.
Lord Henley
The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, mentions the Sub-Treasurer of the Inner Temple and assures the Committee that he does not think that he would act improperly in any way. I hope he would extend that to the Under Treasurer of the Middle Temple, my own Inn, because I am sure she would act in an equally proper manner. I see my noble friend Lord Faulks, who I think is a bencher of the Middle Temple, nodding in agreement on that matter.
Lord Henley
I thank the noble Lord for that. I hope I can deal with some of his queries, and I hope I can assure him that I do not believe that the drafting here is opaque in any way whatever.
When we look at Clause 33(5), it is pretty clear that we have all the classes listed in paragraphs (a) to (j), including the Council of the Isles of Scilly, the Common Council of the City of London and, in effect, all local authorities. Then we have paragraph (k), which states,
“any person specified or described by the Secretary of State in an order made by statutory instrument”.
That is as clear as clear could be that it can be extended by the Secretary of State after consultation with the appropriate people who might be affected. Those people could be public, they could be private, or whatever.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
The Minister will have observed that Clause 33(2) states:
“A failure on the part of any person to act in accordance”,
with the code. That does not seem to sit comfortably with the much wider interpretation in the same clause of the same phrase.
Lord Henley
No, my Lords, it is very clear. In Clause 1, we are talking about any “relevant authority” and relevant authorities are listed in subsection (5). That could be extended. If it was extended, to use “relevant authority” in subsection (2) would not include paragraph (k) of subsection (5). The noble Lord is making a mountain out of a molehill. As I understand it, it is quite clear. Should it be extended, it would then be:
“A failure on the part of any person to act in accordance with the provision”;
“person” in its legal sense would include paragraphs (a) to (j), but would also include paragraph (k) if my right honourable friend had extended those who are covered by it by using subsection 5(k) so to do.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
I promise that this will be my last intervention, but it is important to get this as right as we can. I am afraid the Minister’s argument does not hold because Clause 33(5) starts by saying:
“In this section ‘relevant authority’ means”,
and that includes any extension under paragraph (k). I put that to him, and I would be grateful if he would review this later.
Lord Henley
Obviously, I will take advice from those who are skilled in drafting, which is a skill that I have never learnt and I have no way round it. To me, it is quite clear that there is a relevant authority, and we list the relevant authorities, but “relevant authority” can be extended by subsection 5. Relevant authority is mentioned in subsection (1), but “any person” in subsection (2) would include all those in subsection (5)(a) to (j) and paragraph (k) when it expands the role of paragraphs (a) to (j). I suspect that we will not get very far by arguing this now, but it might be that we could discuss it later. It might be something that I can assure my noble friend that we will look at with the relevant drafting authorities to make sure that we get it right if he thinks that we have got it wrong.
I shall move on to the other questions that my noble friend asked about Clauses 34 and 35 and what the commissioner can do and how he can review the code. My noble friend felt that Clause 34(2)(b) on,
“reviewing the operation of the code”,
and Clause 34(2)(c) on,
“providing advice about the code”,
limit what the commissioner can do. Again, I stress that the commissioner is independent and it will be up to him to decide in the light of what is in statute. He will also have the ability to go beyond that should he so wish. The question that we come back to with the amendment concerns what sort of review we should have. I agree with my noble friend Lady Hamwee that it is quite right that we should keep the code under review, but I believe that the Bill provides adequately for that.
Clause 34 sets out the functions of the commissioner in some detail. They include encouraging compliance with the code and reviewing its operation. The commissioner is also asked to report annually on the exercise of those functions, and those reports will be laid before Parliament. In discharging those functions, we fully expect the commissioner to consider whether the code needs to be revised in any way and, no doubt, to offer advice and include recommendations to that effect in his annual report. We would also expect the commissioner to review from time to time whether the duty to have regard to the code should be extended to other operators, be they public or private, given that the extension of this duty is one of the ways in which he will be able, under Clause 34(2)(a), to encourage compliance with the code. Again, this is something that we want to do. Although the code will initially be binding on the relevant authorities only, we hope that others will look to it as the model by which they act. The commissioner will report annually on his functions so, again, we do not need to wait for up to three years, as suggested by my noble’s friend amendment.
With those assurances and that explanation, and accepting the point that we will certainly look again at what my noble friend Lord Phillips had to say about the drafting—I do not agree with him, but I might be wrong; I frequently am—I hope that my noble friend will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, the Minister referred to compliance by relevant authorities and others who might look at how it is working. That takes us straight back to Clause 33(5)(k) and whether the person referred to there is to be construed in the normal meaning of that language. I have been trying to catch the eye of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott, to tempt him to enter into this, but he has resisted, which is probably quite right. I see now that he is not going to resist.
Lord Scott of Foscote
Everyone who is mentioned in subsection (5) is either an individual or a corporate body and would fall within the meaning of the word “person”.
Baroness Hamwee
I think that might assist us. We are concerned that private corporations, if that is a concept that one can have, should be caught within the term “person”. The example that I used was the operator of a shopping mall. However, perhaps it is not fair to continue this debate in public. My noble friend Lord Phillips and I have made our concern very clear, and this debate is a little circular, so at this point the best thing I can do is to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Rosser
“Independent inquiry into use of investigating powers under RIPA
(1) The Secretary of State must establish an independent inquiry into the use of investigatory powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
(2) The inquiry will examine in particular the use of directed surveillance and possible limits to its use.
(3) The inquiry will examine possible exemptions to the Act relating to the under-age sale of alcohol and tobacco and anti-social behaviour.
(4) Recommendations from that enquiry shall be reported to Parliament.”
Lord Rosser
This amendment relates to investigatory powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. On reading the Government's impact assessment, one could perhaps be forgiven for being a little puzzled about the need that Clauses 37 and 38 seek to address, because the assessment says:
“The coalition is committed to stop local authority use of RIPA … unless it is for serious crime and approved by a magistrate”.
It goes on:
“This stems from perceptions that local authorities have misused RIPA powers particularly in relation to low level issues”.
Thus we appear to see in this Bill that the Government are happy to spend money on the basis of perception, as their impact assessment states, rather than any proven need—despite their stating that money is in short supply. The cost of judicial approval for local authorities to use powers to gather communications data and undertake direct surveillance is apparently £250,000 a year, according to the Interception of Communications Commissioner. Yet we have a situation where the Government claim that they are acting to address public perception.
In his evidence to the Public Bill Committee as head of the independent Review of Counter-Terrorism and Security Powers, the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, while supporting the requirement for judicial review, stated:
“The overwhelming preponderance of evidence gathered by the review showed that local authorities were using their powers quite proportionately and in quite important areas of business”.—[Official Report, Commons, Protection of Freedoms Bill Committee, 22/3/11; col. 27.]
The Interception of Communications Commissioner stated in his evidence that judicial review is,
“wholly unnecessary and will cost money”.
He continued that he had,
“audited a very large percentage of the applications over the last six years and there is simply no evidence of abuse, so there is no problem on which to spend £250,000 a year”.—[Official Report, Commons, Protection of Freedoms Bill Committee, 22/3/11; col. 37.]
In the main, these powers are used for investigating matters such as the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors, antisocial behaviour, trading standards breaches, serious fire safety breaches and such issues. The amendment proposes that the independent inquiry that it provides for should look at exempting the RIPA powers in relation to underage sale of alcohol and tobacco and antisocial behaviour from this Act because they are areas where those powers are most frequently used and where the adverse impact and additional costs under the Bill will be most keenly felt. We are not opposed to the principle of judicial review, since this provides a check on executive power. However, we are opposed to spending money unless it addresses a clearly identified problem, backed up by hard evidence, when in other areas difficult choices are having to be made about cuts to vital services.
Against that background, Amendment 114 places a duty on the Secretary of State to commission an independent inquiry into the use of investigatory powers under RIPA. Amendment 114 does not require an inquiry before the commencement of Clauses 37 and 38. It would not delay implementing this part of the Bill, if the Government are determined to introduce it as soon as possible. It would, though, provide proper hard evidence of the areas, if any, that are in need of regulation—hard evidence which, at the moment, appears to be somewhat lacking. I beg to move.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
My Lords, it is very interesting that the Opposition have chosen to table a fairly narrow amendment to RIPA to explore these issues. In fact, the criticism from the very moment that it was conceived, let alone drafted or passed into law, was that it was poorly drafted and had many problems which I shall enumerate more fully under my Amendment 128.
It is interesting that the Opposition have chosen to table such a narrow amendment. Have they ignored all the other constructive suggestions that have been made? They are focusing their attention simply on this one issue when, in fact, as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has pointed out, it is probably the area of RIPA with the least problems.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I am grateful for that intervention from my noble friend Lady Miller.
The measures in Clauses 37 and 38, together with the changes that we propose to make through secondary legislation, will deliver the coalition commitment to limit local authority use of RIPA—a commitment we made when the coalition came into being following the last election. The Bill also gives effect to the conclusions of the counter-terrorism review which was published in January. That review recommended two changes to the use of RIPA powers by local authorities.
First, these clauses will require that the exercise of RIPA powers by local authorities be subject to prior judicial approval. The second change, which will limit local authority use of directed surveillance to the investigation of offences which carry a maximum six-month sentence, will be implemented through secondary legislation made under RIPA. That will ensure that direct surveillance cannot be used to investigate relatively low-level matters, such as littering, dog fouling and schools enrolment, while still allowing it to be used against large-scale matters such as fly-tipping or waste-tipping, extensive criminal damage and serious or serial benefit fraud cases.
In response to representations received during the review, we have decided to make an exception to the seriousness threshold for offences relating to the underage sales of tobacco and alcohol. The investigation of those offences relies heavily on the use of directed surveillance and so in these circumstances the review concluded that it was appropriate to have a limited carve-out so that trading standards officers could continue to take effective action against businesses which seek to flout the law on age-related sales.
The conclusions of the counter-terrorism review were endorsed by my noble friend Lord Macdonald, who provided independent oversight of the conduct of the review. However, the amendment seeks a rather wider review of RIPA. I will say straightaway that, although the Government agree that it is essential that people’s privacy is protected from any unnecessary or disproportionate access by public bodies discharging their duties, this is precisely why RIPA was introduced, debated and passed by Parliament. And it is precisely why the way it is working is kept under constant review—not just by the Home Office but by the independent commissioners who report to the Prime Minister and publish annual reports which are laid before Parliament.
In bringing forward the current proposals to limit local authority use of RIPA, we are responding to public concern about a specific area in which the law operates. The measures are intended to restore confidence and ensure that any fears of future misuse are unfounded. But there is no well-founded indication that there is a need for much more fundamental reform of RIPA. Indeed, any regulatory regime would need to be built on precisely the same principles and contain the same human rights safeguards as RIPA is built on.
No one should be complacent about how our right to privacy is safeguarded. The measures before us come from one review and were endorsed by a public consultation. We need to get on and deliver them, but I put it to the noble Lord that another review before we have delivered the recommendations of the first would be premature and no doubt expensive—I do not know how many other reviews he will propose during the passage of the Bill. We will continue to monitor how the new arrangements are working in practice and adjust our approach if necessary. The developments will be reported on also by the independent RIPA commissioner, whose published reports, as the noble Lord will be aware, are laid before Parliament each year. We are confident that the measures in the Bill, together with the associated secondary legislation introducing the seriousness threshold, will prevent local authorities using RIPA in a way that undermines public confidence. Therefore, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able withdraw his amendment.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, in drawing up the amendment, which the Minister said was quite wide-ranging in relation to RIPA, we were seeking to address in particular that part of the Act relating to local authorities, since the coalition has made it—and the Minister has reaffirmed it—one of its objectives. It is stated in the impact assessment that the provision stems from perceptions that local authorities have misused powers rather than, apparently, hard evidence. Bearing in mind the Interception of Communications Commissioner’s view that expenditure of £250,000 will be incurred on something that is apparently regarded, certainly as far as local authorities’ use of the powers is concerned, as a perception, it did not seem unreasonable to suggest that there should be an investigation to get some hard evidence so that we might all be clear on precisely what problem we were seeking to address.
However, I have taken note of what the Minister has said. We will reflect further on the matter. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
My Lords, the first seven amendments in this group would enable the Committee to examine a little further the existing complicated system for administrative authorisation. Where the Bill refers to judicial authorisation, one imagines that somebody from the judiciary will authorise whichever investigatory power is being used. However, in the section in the Bill to which my amendments apply, the administrative officer and his superior agree that surveillance is necessary, and the initial authorisation remains an administrative decision that does not come into effect until the approval of a magistrate is given. However, the magistrate will not examine why authorisation is being applied for or anything about the individual concerned; it will be just a review to make sure that the process has been reasonable.
The amendments examine whether the Bill will make the system any more transparent and whether it will be any easier to challenge unfair applications through the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. They examine also whether the system will become more efficient or cheaper. I welcome the Government’s desire to bring judicial authorisation more into the system, but I wonder whether it is sufficient.
Amendment 128 is much wider. I heard the Minister reply to the previous amendment to the effect that the misuse of the Act has been sufficiently addressed, but Amendment 128 has been tabled to probe the Committee’s view on the urgency of reviewing the whole RIPA fabric. This is for several reasons. First, since RIPA was conceived back in the late 1990s, technology has moved on enormously and things are able to be done now which were unimaginable then. It has nothing to do with phone hacking and the News of the World issue—which is still illegal—but with technical and storage capacity. In the 11 years since RIPA was passed, both of those areas have changed out of all recognition.
On re-reading that Act, there appears to be an enormous patchwork of different authorisation schemes, of which this is just one example. That does not seem an efficient way to proceed. The Minister referred to the expense of reviewing. There may be an expense in the inefficiency and patchwork of systems, but what concerns me most is that there are sufficient safeguards against unnecessary and disproportionate use of the surveillance powers.
As to the sheer scale of the use of the powers, we have come to accept that their use is necessary for serious crime and terrorism issues. However, since the Bill was passed, there have been some 3 million decisions made under it by public bodies; 20,000 warrants; 4,000 authorisations for intrusive surveillance and 30,000 for directed surveillance—and that does not include the intelligence services because those figures are not made public. So there is an issue with the scale of what is happening.
The Minister may feel that an inquiry will be expensive and he may be correct—obviously it will incur some expense—but there may be savings to be made if we consider whether the kind of umbrella that RIPA provides is adequate for purpose. It seems to be an umbrella that is full of holes, not only in the authorisation process but in its classification of the different kinds of intrusions—for the sake of the Committee’s time I shall not go into them—which are immense. For example, a phone call that is listened to from outside a house and one that is listened to from inside a house with a bug are different kinds of intrusions and carry different authorisations. As far as the public are concerned, that is a complicated regime—it may be necessarily complicated—and it can pose enormous problems in the complaints procedure if an individual has been subject to that intrusion.
If, as a member of the public, you want to complain about unfair investigatory powers, it is obviously extremely difficult. I have mentioned the figure of 3 million. Out of that, 1,100 complaints have been heard by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, of which only 10 have been upheld. That tends to suggest that there is a problem.
I am sure that many Members of the Committee have seen the thorough Justice report, Freedom from Suspicion: Surveillance Reform for a Digital Age, which lays out the issues in a detailed manner and gives all the references. Given the evidence that is presented in that report alone, Parliament has a duty to hold the kind of inquiry that Amendment 128 seeks. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel)
Perhaps it will be for the convenience of the Committee if I explain that in an earlier edition of the groupings all the Amendments 115 to 128 were grouped. In a later edition there are two groups: first, Amendments 115 and 120 to 128; and then a second group with Amendments 116, 117, 118, 119 and 122. So there are two groups.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I support my noble friend on this group of amendments. I was the unfortunate person who was the main spokesman for these Benches on the original Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill, and what a nightmare it was. Indeed, what a nightmare RIPA 2000 still is. It is one of the paradoxes of human rights law these days that it is for every man and every woman but the way in which it is framed—and, to some extent, I suppose, has to be framed—means that it is almost inaccessible except to a handful of specialist lawyers. This Bill is an exemplification of that on stilts.
A few moments ago, the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, moved Amendment 114, calling for an independent inquiry into the use of investigative powers, which has some commonality with Amendment 128. Despite what the Minister said, I believe that RIPA is important, and getting more important given the advances in technology in so complex and fast-moving a world. We have the Leveson inquiry at the moment looking into breaches in one corner of this surveillance market. I believe that despite the expense—and it is fair never to ignore the expense and time involved in these investigations, inquiries and reviews—this is a warranted proposal.
The existing RIPA is internally inconsistent. Its implementation is certainly widely inconsistent. I believe that we need to be highly sensitive to the issue of civic trust because in the surveillance society there is a culture that is extremely unhealthy to democracy and in which citizens feel that their lives are not their own. If one wanted one most vivid example of the state of affairs that I am trying to describe, it is the reaction of the public to the Milly Dowler affair, which still reverberates. That was a fair reflection of the degree of sensitivity that exists in relation to intrusive surveillance and so on. Because of the points so well put by my noble friend Lady Miller, I think that despite the cost and the fact that the commissioners make annual reports, at this stage, more than 10 years after the passage of RIPA in 2000, the Government should think hard about standing back from this legislation and the amendments that will be introduced by this Bill and look at RIPA hard and long and carefully, and with wide public consultation that goes beyond the usual suspects and gets to the sort of people who were so frantic about some of the revelations that have been before us in the past year or so and are being rehashed in the Leveson inquiry.
For those reasons, I support this group of amendments and the increase in judicial oversight of the whole apparatus of intrusive, directed and covert surveillance that we have heard about today.
Lord Selsdon
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 126 and the other amendments. I support my noble friend Lady Miller. This subject is, unfortunately, one of my hobbies. I am totally opposed to people entering other people’s property without permission or court orders and I am totally opposed to this form of surveillance, even if it is called observation. I declare an interest as former secretary of the Parliamentary Space Committee; I am involved in space and privy to certain information about advanced technology that makes me even more nervous.
RIPA was a great idea when it started—like most things with initials that you cannot remember—but, even when it is amended, I will be concerned about public bodies and, in particular, covert activities. However, public bodies can get round the safeguards that are there by accepting evidence gathered by non-public bodies. That leads us to the fear that in these sorts of covert operations a public body, all in good faith, may find that it has an opportunity to obtain from a third party information that may be offered to it, not necessarily by a hacker but by some person who finds that he has something of value that could be sold. The amendment proposed is that one should not be able to use that information in prosecutions.
I will not go too far on this but we know that the listening devices that are around are extremely sophisticated and can be programmed from many miles away. Aerial surveillance is also possible from satellites in real time—not the Google thing of showing a picture of your house from above but information that can be picked up.
The purpose of Amendment 126 is to introduce a safety clause. I think that the Minister may be prepared to accept it. Once amended by the Protection of Freedoms Bill, public bodies will be able to get round the safeguards by accepting evidence gathered by non-public bodies using covert surveillance that could not have been authorised by the public body itself. This may mean that the public body, in good faith, is offered information or materials that could be helpful in pursuing its course by a private sector or non-public body. The question is therefore whether the public body has any responsibility for this and for the information provided. The suggestion here is that if freedoms are to be protected the loophole must be closed and it must not be acceptable for information to be gathered covertly without proper authorisation and used for prosecution. That means that the public body must take responsibility for any information that may be gathered and its name must be linked to it. Thus any information that is gathered that the public body has not itself authorised or been associated with should be excluded from any efforts of prosecution.
We know that many examples of this are being pushed around at present. The amendment is relatively simple; it says that anything that is done in the name of a public body, or is misused in the public body’s name, must be the responsibility of the public body, which should be responsible for making sure that everything is in order.
Lord Henley
My Lords, just to make sure that I get things right, I should make it clear that it is my understanding from the intervention from the Deputy Chairman of Committees that we are dealing with Amendments 115 and 120 to 128, but not with those in the name of my noble friend Lord Phillips, which start at Amendment 116, those being a separate group.
Lord Henley
I take that correction. I do not know how long we will spend finishing off this amendment, but perhaps this one or the next should be the last one that we deal with today, because I think we have made pretty good progress. We have will have a relatively short list of amendments to discuss for the next day and will have no problem finishing off Committee stage when we return after Christmas.
I am grateful to both my noble friends Lady Miller and Lord Selsdon for setting out their arguments in support of these amendments and I shall briefly deal with them. I start with Amendment 115 and the amendments associated with it—Amendments 120, 121, 123, 125 and 127—which leave out “relevant” or “relevant person”. We are introducing a judicial approval mechanism to restore public confidence in local authorities’ use of covert techniques. Local authorities will no longer be able to self-authorise or to use directed surveillance in trivial cases, thereby further safeguarding personal privacy. Such public concern does not exist for the use of covert techniques in cases of serious crime or national security. In a judicial review it will be for the magistrate to approve the authorisation for local authorities to use such techniques only where he or she believes that use of the technique would be both necessary and proportionate.
Imposing judicial approval on all public authorities, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which the amendment of my noble friend Lady Miller seeks to do, could seriously impair the operational effectiveness of such organisations. Having to seek a magistrate’s approval may, given the extent to which such techniques are used, result in operational delay, which could have grave consequences. Furthermore, it is wholly inappropriate for the sensitive nature of these cases to be disposed to a local magistrate.
RIPA authorisations for the most sensitive techniques, such as intrusive surveillance and interception, which may be used only by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, are already pre-approved by a surveillance commissioner or the Secretary of State. The Government will continue to keep the use of RIPA under review and respond in the most appropriate way if there is evidence of misuse. If in the future there is a compelling case for extending the requirement for prior judicial authorisation for certain other public authorities, these clauses confer an order-making power to enable this to happen.
On the second part of Amendment 128, my noble friend Lady Miller suggested that there should be a further review by an independent reviewer. I appreciate that the concern behind the amendment is that the Act is now some 10 years old and that the pace of technological development during this time has been unparalleled, a point to which my noble friend Lord Selsdon referred. I agree that how this legislation is performing and keeping pace with these developments is something on which we would naturally all seek assurance.
At its heart, RIPA is human rights legislation; it contains human rights safeguards to ensure that it carries on working as Parliament intended. Those safeguards include the appointment of independent bodies to oversee, inspect and redress wrongs. As the Committee will be aware, there are three independent commissioners—all of whom have held some of the highest judicial offices in the land—to examine various aspects of how RIPA is working and to publish their findings. Their inspection teams visit public authorities using RIPA powers and provide valuable advice on interpreting the law correctly, and surveillance commissioners authorise some of its more invasive techniques. In addition, those commissioners produce annual reports on their findings which are laid before Parliament each year. So we already have an effective mechanism for ongoing scrutiny and reporting the findings to Parliament. The commissioners will continue to inspect local authorities and will report on how the judicial approval provisions are working in practice.
As to the wider question of changing the law to permit intercept material to be used evidentially—which is currently prohibited by Section 17 of RIPA—that is already being independently reviewed by Sir John Chilcot, who is leading a cross-party group of privy counsellors to examine how a model to permit this could work in practice. The Government will bring the subject before Parliament again once the cross-party committee has finished taking evidence. When it does so is a matter over which I have no control, but I look forward to being able to debate these matters in due course.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
My Lords, I must congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, on his success in having his amendment taken forward to the next stage. Every small move in this direction is very important, because, as my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury said, this is a matter of civic trust. I thank the Minister for his reply. The issue of civic trust comes up because of the inability of current legislation to deal with the scale of interference in areas such as internet use. The intelligence agencies and the police have better systems in place; I have in mind instances where people do not know about the interference, such as in the BT and Phorm case. A natural tension exists: it is the duty of government to consent to intrusion in the interests of security and crime prevention, but it is the duty of Parliament to make sure that those intrusions are proportionate. Although I shall on this occasion withdraw the amendment, I hope that we will return to it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Henley
My Lords, with the agreement of the Committee, this might be a convenient moment to adjourn until Thursday at 2 pm.
House of Lords
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Health and Social Care Bill
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Thornton
“(c) is to continue as regulator of NHS Foundation Trusts as set out in Chapter 5 of Part 2 of the National Health Service Act 2006”
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, at last we move to Part 3. I hope the House will tolerate a longer speech from me than I normally make. I have made just a series of very short speeches so far on the Bill. There are many amendments in this part in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Beecham. I would like to take this opportunity to explain the rationale behind the suite of amendments that we have put before the Committee today. I thought the Committee might prefer one longish speech rather than 10 short ones, which will almost certainly save time.
Our amendments are largely in this group, which addresses the role and powers of Monitor, and the next two groups, which address Monitor as a licensing body and its accountability. Later today, in groups eight and nine, there are the issues of pricing and the failure regime.
On these Benches, we decided some time ago that this was the heart of the Bill. Over all the debates we have had in the last 11 days, it has become abundantly clear that the reason we have this mammoth Bill, bringing about the expensive and risky reorganisation of our NHS, is to create a regulated market in the NHS. On these Benches, we have always believed that fundamentally, this Bill was conceived and constructed, around Part 3. Even after the pause for reflection and the report from the Future Forum, that remains the case.
Version 1 of the Bill was at least honest in being the embodiment of what Andrew Lansley had promised to do to our NHS back in 2005. He is at one with his colleagues Oliver Letwin and George Osborne. Mr Lansley wants markets and is against a communally owned and publicly run public sector. Like his Conservative colleagues, he believes that competition solves every problem and is a cure-all. Indeed, Mr Lansley’s background in establishing regulated utilities in his five-year preparation as the shadow Health Secretary makes it clear that he wants to treat our healthcare just the same as gas, water and electricity. That was version 1.
That finally collapsed when people including the Liberal Democrats actually read and understood the White Paper and the Bill. I will not trouble your Lordships’ House by picking over the corpses of versions 2 and 3 of the Bill, but we now have version 4, and I suspect that we are still far from finished. This Bill is a mess. It is now a catalogue of compromises, except, it has to be said, the framework that we have on offer in Part 3, which would, over time, allow Mr Lansley’s vision to be fulfilled. He must be hanging on to that for dear life.
We believe that Monitor is being asked to fulfil too many functions and set too many priorities, and that some of these are potentially, if not actually, in conflict with each other. We hope the House will appreciate that, on these Benches, we have done the House a big favour. We have rewritten Part 3 to make it simpler and more coherent. We have taken out the nonsense parts, such as the voting system in Clauses 116 to 121, which as it were bring the X Factor system into the NHS. Why not have phone-in votes for CCG chairs, for example?
We have taken out the convoluted and bureaucratic ideas around levies and risk pooling. After all, that is part of what the NHS is for—to pool the risks. Our advice is to keep it simple. We believe that the attempt to define the rules-based system for the NHS was always doomed. The idea that, like a true regulated market, we can set out the rules in primary legislation and contracts and then let the courts decide everything is just plain daft—unless you are a lawyer, of course. They must be salivating at the business coming their way if this Bill becomes an Act in its current form. Does the presence of excessive legality and constant contracting sound familiar? It should, because essentially that is what happens in the United States healthcare system.
We have, like Monitor, suggested that instead, the principles and rules for co-operation and competition—PRCC—that we put in place when we were in government should be left as the basis for the system. We also suggest that the Co-operation and Competition Panel should retain its role of advising on complaints about any breaches of the rules, which was at one time the Government’s position, and it may still be. For us, a defining characteristic is that the pinnacle of such a system is that there is a Secretary of State who sets the framework through the PRCC.
I would like to dispel the myth that Labour is against reform. In 1997, we came in to rescue the NHS after many years of neglect. On everything worth measuring, the NHS of 2010 was far, far better than in 1997. It is only in 2011 that we have seen it start to go backwards again, as waiting times get longer and access is restricted. Our track record on reform is there. Clearly, we did not get everything right, but we learnt. The current Administration have launched the biggest reorganisation of the NHS in its history, despite the promises that they would not and despite all the evidence that reorganisations set the NHS back two to three years, and despite the costs and risks involved—except, of course, that we are not allowed to know exactly what those risks are.
Labour introduced independent regulation of quality to the NHS. We support the continued role for Monitor with regard to foundation trusts, which we put in place. We accept the idea of extending tough financial regulation over all providers in the NHS through the use of a licensing scheme. But we do not accept the handing over of economic regulation of the NHS to a quango. We wish Monitor to retain its powers to oversee foundation trusts, and, like Sir David Nicholson, we see the value in retaining the possibility of de-authorisation of a foundation trust into a safe haven to permit restructuring and reconfiguration. But more on FTs later.
We have never been against the idea of competition. Indeed, we set out the principles and rules basis on which it could operate. We have never been against using the private sector where this adds necessary capacity or provides expertise not available within the NHS. Our experience, good as well as bad, informs our response to the Bill.
There is a place for competition. It is not, and never should be, the main driving force for reform of the NHS. We are against the promotion of competition for its own sake, as this Bill originally intended. We believe the balance between co-operation and competition is a matter for the Secretary of State to determine, in the best interests of patients, not for a quango to determine in the interests of some ideological bias.
Further along in the consideration of our amendments, we set out the process by which major reconfigurations could be proposed, consulted on and determined. We set out for the first time the idea of a rules-based failure regime. We do not see failure as a desirable feature of a market system; we see it as a failure of planning and commissioning and as something to avoid, not welcome. But if all early intervention efforts are insufficient, then an orderly rules-based administration process is necessary, so we set one out.
In all these areas, we do not oppose development of the NHS or reform. We simply fundamentally disagree with the approach being used by this Administration, which is highly disruptive and expensive and takes focus away from the Nicholson challenge. Along with the Liberal Democrats of old, we oppose the change to a regulated market at the expense of democratic control. These are the wrong reforms at the wrong time and, we add, for the wrong reason. Healthcare is not another utility to be regulated and privatised. Our NHS has as its foundation the twin principles of universality and social solidarity. It is not a candidate for conversion into a fully fledged market. We introduced regulation to give the public some independent reassurance. We introduced external assessments of quality in the NHS. The role of the quality regulator, the CQC, is unchanged by the Bill. We support the CQC, but only if it is properly resourced. We set up NICE, which is acknowledged as a world leader in its field. We set up Monitor and we think it is too early to evaluate its success, as the move to an all-FT system has taken far longer than envisaged and proved more complicated than was assumed—a lesson not yet learnt by this Government.
The job is really only half done. What we do know is that there is no miracle transformation tool. The evidence is that foundation trusts do not progress any faster than non-foundation trusts. There is little, if any, evidence that foundation trusts are more innovative, more risk-taking or more competitive than their non-FT colleagues. It is a mix.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, I thought it might be helpful to the Committee if I intervened relatively briefly at this point to put this part of the Bill into context and explain what we are trying to achieve. Part 3 has been much discussed and, I am afraid to say, much misunderstood. It is, in my view, fundamental to the modernisation of the NHS. It is worth restating why that modernisation is so important.
We need to improve health outcomes and we need to increase productivity in the NHS. Achieving both of these is essential if we are to meet the challenges of caring for an ageing population, managing increased prevalence of chronic disease and funding the rising costs of new drugs and other technologies.
Part 3 helps to enable this by establishing a clear and comprehensive legal framework for sector regulation to protect patients’ interests, based on the principles and values enshrined in the NHS constitution. Monitor’s distinctive role would be to secure value for money in the provision of healthcare services, in the interests of patients. Its overarching statutory duty, which is crystal clear in the Bill, is to protect and promote patients’ interests by promoting economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of services while maintaining or improving quality. The key words there are “protect and promote patients’ interests”. This overarching duty would provide Monitor with a clear and enduring purpose. The duty would be the guiding principle for Monitor’s decisions, for example in resolving any conflicts that may arise in the exercise of its functions. For example, if in future Monitor were to have any doubt about a decision, it would come back to that guiding principle. Equally, it will not be open to Monitor to do anything that infringes that principle.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
The noble Earl knows that that part of the Bill does that only for a limited period of time. He also knows that many people involved with foundation trusts think that should be a consistent and ongoing role of Monitor. Have the Government reassessed so that that is a more complete and comprehensive approach for Monitor, signalled clearly in the Bill?
Earl Howe
What the noble Baroness says it quite right. It would be open to a future Secretary of State to extend the period under which Monitor retained that role. My purpose at the moment is to set out the Government’s position. I am sure we can come on to debate these things, if the noble Baroness will allow, but it is important for the Committee to have the Government’s prospectus in their minds.
The remit of Monitor would be expanded to cover all NHS-funded healthcare providers. This approach ensures that Monitor and everything that it does is governed by a single, coherent legal framework and that all its functions are bound together by a single, overarching statutory duty—the one that I read out. For that reason, I would counsel noble Lords to resist amendments that may seek to achieve similar aims, but do so by retaining a separate legal framework for regulation of foundation trusts.
Many people have sought to portray the new role for Monitor as some sort of mighty club-wielding behemoth, dictating to commissioners how NHS resources should be spent. This is not the case. Monitor’s role, as set out in Part 3, is intended to support and complement the role of commissioners, as set out in Part 2. Our aim is to empower those commissioners—GPs and other clinicians—to take the lead, arranging access to services to meet their patients’ needs and stimulating innovation and improvement. Commissioners will have various tools at their disposal to do this. They will need to decide how to use co-operation, integration and competition to improve quality or efficiency or reduce inequalities.
In that context, the appropriate role for Monitor would be to support commissioners by enabling integration and where competition is used, ensuring that this operates effectively. Monitor’s role is not—I repeat, not—to impose competition from above. Competition is not now and will not be an end in itself.
Our strategy for improving the provision of NHS services is firmly based on the principle of autonomy and accountability for providers. Building on this, we have proposed functions for Monitor that aim to strengthen incentives for providers to improve, rather than simply relying on the ability for Monitor to set and enforce rules. Promoting competition is part of this, but again the context of promoting is quite different from the idea of driving competition through top-down controls. It will not do that, and it would not be effective even if it did.
What has struck me, looking at these amendments, is that, while there are clear differences between some noble Lords and the Government, I also feel that there is a significant consensus emerging. I want to reiterate that the Government are always willing to listen to how the Bill could be improved. I have listened to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, but I have also studied very closely the amendments tabled by other noble Lords, particularly my noble friends Lady Jolly, Lord Clement-Jones, Lady Williams and Lord Marks, as well as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy.
I am sympathetic to a number of the concerns raised by noble Lords, which we shall hear about. I would like to highlight four at this point. The first is the Secretary of State’s ability to specify matters that Monitor must take into account. I am sympathetic to noble Lords’ concerns that we should clarify the mechanisms by which this can happen. The second is the conflicts between Monitor’s functions. It has always been our intention that Monitor should take responsibility for making appropriate arrangements within its organisation to avoid potential conflicts. However, I will explore this further with Monitor in time to provide greater clarity and reassurance before Report stage. The third area is failures to co-operate. Again, I am sympathetic to noble Lords’ concerns that Monitor should have the ability to address abuses and protect patients’ interests. We believe that the safeguards in the Bill already achieve this aim, but we will look to ensure that Monitor is properly equipped to enforce this. The final issue is reviews by the Competition Commission, where I sympathise with noble Lords’ concerns that the provisions as drafted may not yet fully reflect the revisions to Monitor’s role that were introduced in response to the NHS Future Forum.
That is all that I propose to say for now. I hope that it has been helpful for me to speak early in this debate to give some additional clarity to the Government’s intentions in this vital area of the Bill.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I very much appreciate the opening speeches from both sides on this group of amendments. I particularly recognise that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has put a great deal of care and consideration into the amendments that she has tabled and they represent a huge amount of work, particularly without the benefit of a Bill team. It is also clear from both speeches that now is the moment to start the debate about the application of EU and domestic competition law to the NHS.
The Bill contains a number of measures that could increase competition within the NHS at the expense of collaboration and integration and which, in my view and that of many of my noble friends, increase the risk that UK competition law will apply as if healthcare were a utility like gas or telecoms. Amendment 288G is the first of a number of amendments tabled by me and my noble friends seeking to minimise that risk.
I am not against competition in the NHS—I suspect that very few of us are—but it must be where it is appropriate. It is not appropriate in all circumstances. Public and patient benefit can often be secured in other ways. We have discussed integration of services throughout the Committee as an alternative and as a complement to competition. Having a balance and choosing the appropriate mechanism that is best for patients is what the debate about Monitor’s powers has focused on to date.
I accept that EU competition law has had some application within the health service for some years now. However, along with many others, I do not want to see EU competition law apply universally across the health service so that our commissioners and providers are required to operate a market-based NHS, red in tooth and claw, without being able to choose where it should apply and where it should not. In my view and that of my noble friends, the risk, for reasons that I shall explain, of a number of elements of the Bill being taken together increases the likelihood of NHS services being found by English and EU courts to fall within the scope of UK and EU competition law. These include, first, potential deregulation of FTs from 1 April 2016, in terms of Monitor no longer having the power to set special conditions under Clause 109 for foundation trusts. That is what Amendment 288G is designed to address. The stand part debates for Clauses 110 to 112, which I support, are also relevant.
Secondly, there are so many new areas where the Competition Commission is deployed. There is the role where Monitor has given notice to include a special condition in a licence in determining whether the matters subject to the proposed condition are potentially contrary to the public interest and whether the special condition provides a remedy. That is Clause 99. There is also its role in reviewing the development of competition in the NHS in the provision of healthcare and the exercise by Monitor of its functions in relation to the provision of healthcare services. That is Clause 76. Its role where there are objections in setting the method of setting prices for the national tariff by Monitor is in Clauses 118 onwards. Finally, there is oversight of foundation trust mergers as a result of the application Part 3 of the Enterprise Act.
Thirdly, after the potential deregulation of foundation trusts and the role of the Competition Commission, there is the lifting of the private patient income cap for foundation hospitals, in Clauses 161 and 162, which opens the way for some foundation trusts to derive the majority of their income from private patients. In that context, I am very pleased to see Amendment 299ZA, tabled by the noble Earl.
If EU competition law were to apply in an unrestrained manner across the NHS, private sector companies that bid unsuccessfully for NHS contracts could make a European competition complaint and challenge commissioning decisions in the courts, and/or the status of foundation hospitals, undermining the mainstream of the NHS in the delivery of services such as intensive care units, A&E, emergency cover, teaching, training and research. The number of such complaints across the EU has increased over recent years.
It was, of course, to minimise the risk of the unrestrained application of EU competition rules that the rules of co-operation and competition and the Co-operation and Competition Panel were devised in 2008. But this Bill, on the face of it, goes much further in encouraging competition. There is a view that the incorporation of those rules in statute is yet another reason to believe that the NHS is at risk in this way.
The applicability of domestic and European competition law to an NHS body, whether commissioner or provider, essentially turns on whether it is an undertaking for the purposes of competition law. Only a grievance between undertakings and abuses committed by dominant undertakings are within the scope of the Competition Act 1998 and Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. There is, in fact, no definition of the term, “undertaking”, in domestic or European legislation, so the scope of the term has been developed and considered through case law of the domestic and European courts.
I do not propose to give your Lordships a legal lecture—I do not believe I would be able to—but briefly, there are two cases in particular that are of some importance. The question of whether an NHS trust is an undertaking for the purposes competition law was considered by the Competition Appeals Tribunal in the case of BetterCare Group Ltd in 2002. BetterCare was a UK provider of residential and nursing home care, which complained to the OFT that the North and West Belfast Health and Social Services Trust, acting as a purchaser of nursing and residential care home services, was abusing its dominant market position in Belfast. The OFT rejected the complaint on the basis that the trust was not an undertaking for the purposes of competition law. On appeal of the OFT’s decision by BetterCare, the Competition Appeals Tribunal determined that the trust was acting as an undertaking both in the purchasing of services from BetterCare and in the direct provision of elderly care by its own statutory home. This was for various reasons, but of particular importance in the current context, is that in providing care through its own homes, the trust was also a participant in a market for residential care, alongside independent providers, and the trust was in a position to generate the effects that the competition rules seek to prevent.
In FENIN, a case brought by an association of companies involved in the marketing of medical goods used in Spanish hospitals, the European Court of First Instance in 2003 upheld a decision by the European Commission rejecting a complaint alleging abuse of a dominant position by 26 bodies or organisations, including three Ministries of the Spanish Government, which run the Spanish national health system. The Commission had rejected the complaint on the grounds that these bodies were not acting as undertakings in their dealings with suppliers. The Court of First Instance considered that where an organisation purchased goods not for the purpose of offering goods and services as part of an economic activity but in order to use them in the context of a different activity, such as one of a purely social nature, it does not act as an undertaking simply because it is a purchaser of those goods.
Lord Owen
My Lords, I hope I will not be spending too much time on the excellent argument that we have heard from the noble Lord, who is a lawyer. I agree with everything that he has said, except that I want to draw attention to the absence of detail that, if we do not move now, we will confront when we face regulations on competitive markets and on the whole question of a qualified person.
Let me first say to the Minister that it should be very clear that there is no consensus whatever on this aspect of the Bill. You cannot be aware of the arguments among general practitioners, among surgeons and physicians and within the nursing and midwifery profession and still believe that there is consensus on this question of competition. There is very considerable concern. As to his assertion that all this was fundamental to the modernisation of the NHS, if this is not changed it will be fundamental to the destruction of the NHS.
Let us start with the first issue. We have evidence— like evidence-based medicine—about what unbridled competition does to a national health service. It has been referred to earlier in the debate. I recommend noble Lords to look at the question raised in the article by Colin Pritchard in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine this year, comparing health service competition policies in the USA, the UK and 17 western countries between 1979 and 2005. The conclusion is:
“In cost-effective terms, i.e. economic input versus clinical output, the USA healthcare system was one of the least cost-effective in reducing mortality rates whereas the UK was one of the most cost-effective over the period”.
This is not a health service that deserves to be turned upside down and it does not deserve to be exposed to the American healthcare system. I have had 17 years as a non-executive on the board of one of the biggest American healthcare companies, Abbott Laboratories. Many aspects of American medical scientific research are the finest in the world. Many aspects of medical and surgical care in certain specialised hospitals in the United States are undoubtedly the best in the world. There is considerable excellence, but if you look at the system overall there is a deplorable decay in quality of care in some parts of the United States, which would make a third world developed country ashamed. I am not prepared to be borne along by some vague talk of consensus on this Bill. The Bill is hated in many aspects, particularly this aspect, in the National Health Service. The BMA has said that it should be withdrawn and has calculated that it would be less disruptive to withdraw it now than for it to continue.
Let me take up some other aspects. I shall speak to the Amendments 278AA, 278BB and 278BC in my name. Amendment 278BB would insert,
“shall not commission services through competitive markets through a competition-based mechanism”.
“Competitive markets” is a term of art. It has meaning in the world of competition. The requirement to manage competitive markets arises from supra-national legislation, with a detailed regime that must be applied, specified in EU law and reflected in national law. That is an obligation to reflect the EU regime unless some clawback of sovereignty is made.
That is the situation, and it applies right across the board. Mr David Bennett, who is to be the chairman of Monitor, wrote in an article in the Times in February:
“We, in the UK, have done this in other sectors before. We did it in gas, we did it in power, we did it in telecoms … We’ve done it in rail, we’ve done it in water, so there’s actually 20 years of experience in taking monopolistic, monolithic markets and providers and exposing them to economic regulation”.
First of all, I do not concede that the National Health Service is a monopolistic, monolithic market. It is a very interesting fact, which is frequently forgotten, that the GP is an independent contractor, and has been since 1948. Many of the debates in this Chamber focused on this issue. My father was a doctor before the National Health Service. He charged patients because he had to. He hated doing so. But he was adamant that he was not going to go into a National Health Service—which he wanted and which he voted for in 1945—if he had to give up his independent contractor basis. He may have been wrong or he may have been right, but it is a massive difference in how you describe the NHS when you think of these independent contractors who have been there from the start.
There are many other aspects of the hospital basis of the National Health Service, which took on in 1948 the spirit and commitment of voluntary hospitals up and down the country. Their assets were frankly seized by the state, but fortunately a lot of their moral underpinnings and fundamental values were not. It has been one of the triumphs of the National Health Service that it has been able to take some of that voluntary spirit and keep it within the National Health Service. Why was it that for decades, hospital doctors, surgeons and physicians worked very long hours uncomplainingly? What absurdity it is that that has been taken away from them by EU regulations and we have successive Governments who all agree that it is ridiculous nonsense, but they can do nothing about it. We are about to do the same to the whole National Health Service on this EU point. This is not a minor point.
The noble Earl knows that I respect him very greatly as a parliamentarian. He has shown it day after day in the patient way in which he has examined the debates in this House, many of which have not been controversial, but have been informative and intelligent and could make some addition to this Bill. But I am afraid that on the fundamentals he speaks for a department that shows at every serious part of examination of the Bill that it is not prepared to provide us with the true facts. We had this debate about risk assessment. Let me come to the issue about competition. In 2006, a Labour Government commissioned a major study on competition and the effects on the EU. It is a scandal that I have been trying for months through Freedom of Information to get hold of this document so that we would have it before this debate.
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, I rise first to express my regrets to the House that, ironically for reasons connected to an NHS commitment, I shall not be able to be present for a lot of our proceedings later on.
Secondly, and related to that commitment, I should declare my interest as chair of the Suffolk Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust Board.
Thirdly, I do not seek, nor am I qualified, to follow the three speeches that have preceded mine: I refer to the detail into which the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, went, the important legal points of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, and the many of the points which the noble Lord, Lord Owen, discussed. I have a good deal of sympathy with many but not all of the points that each of them made and I hope that they will be carefully addressed by the Minister when he comes to wind up. My purpose, however, is rather more limited and pragmatic.
I say to my noble friend the Minister that I would not reject out of hand the interpretation and explanation of context that he gave in the early part of this debate. I think that there are questions that still need to be answered, as has been made clear, but I am prone to give him the benefit of the doubt on the general approach that he outlined.
I particularly welcome—it is very important, given the uncertainties that we all face about the import of this Bill, underlined by the noble Lord, Lord Owen—that my noble friend gave some clear indications of areas where he thought clarification was possible and where he would give serious consideration to some of these amendments. In the light of that, I would be disinclined to try to shoot him down today, but I would not be disinclined to shoot him down—or try to shoot him down, at any rate— if we do not see some changes and improvements related to these concerns before the Report stage.
I would like to make a few pragmatic points. First, we ought to acknowledge that what is in this Bill about Monitor is a lot better than what was the previous legal situation about Monitor, where the Secretary of State had no power to intervene at all. I will come back in a different way in a moment to what Monitor took into account, but we should recognise that there are already some signs—and this relates to my experience—that Monitor has got some of the message that is emerging from this debate. I refer back to my own personal interests and experience. I have been chair of two trusts, which have been through the Monitor process. The first of them—the Royal Brompton and Harefield—did happily become a foundation trust after I had become time expired as its chair. The second one—the one I chair at the moment—was in the process of trying to become a foundation trust at the time. Indeed, I was told when I was recruited for it that my task was to get it to be a foundation trust. For reasons I will not go into, that did not prove possible and we went down a different route. My observation—it is related to my comment just now about Monitor—is that in the intervening period there had been a sharp shift in Monitor’s attitude. When I first embarked on this, there was a clear feeling—Bill Moyes, the previous chairman would not thank me for saying this—that all that mattered was the money. Bill Moyes would have denied that, but I can only tell you that that is what it felt like. Then came Mid-Staffs and the whole situation changed, as I judge it, for the better. Patient safety and quality and all those issues began to be as important, if not more important, than the financial ones—not that the financial ones are unimportant.
At any rate, I come back to the story and the plus point for Monitor. Once we had decided at SMHP that foundation trust status of our own did not look likely, we decided that the best bet was merger with the neighbouring trust, Norfolk and Waveney, because East Anglia is a coherent whole, with all sorts of synergy and the rest of it—I will not go into the arguments. So we set about getting together with them as a joint venture. The rhetoric was merger: the legality was acquisition. They were an FT and we were not— I will come back to that point in a moment as well. I have no way of describing to the House just how difficult that proved and how many obstacles were planted in the way by the process.
We were advised that acquisition was simpler than merger, which is one of the reasons we went for it. I can only say that if the Minister wants to get the many remaining trusts that are not FTs into FT status through mergers, he is going to need to make sure that it can be done more easily than was the case in the one of which I have experience. If acquisitions are easy, mergers must be a nightmare.
Baroness Meacher
My Lords, I rise to speak in support of Amendment 260EA which, as I understand it, seeks to maintain the essentials of the role of Monitor as set out in the 2006 Act. I support the extending of Monitor’s roles beyond those of foundation trusts. However, in response to the argument of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that we need to change the functions of Monitor in order to achieve cost-effectiveness, improvements in quality and productivity in the years ahead, I would argue that with Monitor as it stands, together with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and the CQC—a great improvement on its predecessor—we have all the tools we need in the kitbag in order to improve our productivity, quality and cost-effectiveness.
I want to focus on one issue which I believe to be the greatest threat presented by these reforms to the improved quality and cost-effectiveness of the health service. There are two powerful reasons for avoiding the reorganisation of Monitor. The first is that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Monitor has been, in my experience, an extremely successful organisation, with one exception to which I will return. The second is that the main new ingredient is, indeed, the promotion of competition that has been addressed so effectively by other noble Lords. Although this will not be based on price, I have absolutely no doubt that it will drive financially driven decision-making.
I want to touch on these two points. Monitor is not broke, as it were. Having been on the receiving end of Monitor’s demanding regime for accreditation as a foundation trust service, I can vouch for the fact that Monitor has been the engine behind the transformation of inefficient organisations, run by boards with weak non-executive directors—who therefore offered very little professional challenge to the executive directors—weak financial systems and weak financial management. That is what we had, and that is what other trusts have had, prior to undergoing the rigorous process driven by Monitor to become foundation trusts. In my case, as chairman, I had no alternative but to get rid of my chief executive officer—no easy task but somehow this process enabled that to happen—and, indeed, to get rid of my non-executive directors. It was as simple as that. The same process continues to take place all over the country. I know this because others tell me. My belief is that we owe to Monitor, more than any other organisation with the possible exception of NICE, the fact that the NHS is now one of the most cost-effective health systems in the world, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, has said very clearly. We should be proud of that.
At this stage I ought to mention Mid-Staffs, because this is, indeed, the one failure to which people refer. As I understand it, the problem was that Monitor at that stage had no information about quality, and the Healthcare Commission, which at that stage was responsible for quality inspection, did not pass data to Monitor. All those problems have been resolved, and they needed to be, because without the quality information, Monitor was ill-equipped to do the job it had to do.
I come now to my second point, which is about the promotion of money-based competition. I want to emphasise “money-based”, because I support competition, but it must be based on the quality of services to patients. The promotion of money-based competition and private sector provision of health services will be a detrimental and costly experiment. We have only to look to other countries, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, has said, to realise that this is nothing short of a disastrous route forward. I refer to page 19 of the Department of Health’s document Protecting and Promoting Patients’ Interests: The Role of Sector Regulation. It states:
“Regulation and competition will always play an important role”.
I know that the word “competition” here means money-based competition: not price-based, but financially based or commercially based. It goes on to say that Monitor will,
“provide a fair playing field for all, regardless of ownership”.
I understand that the existing foundation trusts will remain as they are as long as they remain solvent. The document refers to patients wanting more choice. As we know, we can get any answer we want from surveys, as long as we ask the right questions. No patient would want more choice if they were aware of the costs and the appalling consequences of the dominance of the money motive in a commercial system. Patients want choice within the systems that we currently have.
I will not focus on the US, because we know that with health costs soaring towards 20 per cent of GDP and 30 million people excluded from remotely satisfactory health care, this cannot be a model to follow. However, Germany is held up as a good example of a health system which has worked with more competition in the system for a long time. I will start with an anecdote. A German orthopaedic surgeon we met on holiday a few years ago happily referred to the fact that he and his colleagues regularly undertake unnecessary operations if they are short of work. What was remarkable was that he seemed completely unembarrassed that this should be the case and that he should admit such a terrible thing to somebody who is used to working in a country with a national health service. It seemed completely normal; it clearly is.
I want to make available to your Lordships the more considered experience of one of the German consultants, Professor Priebe, who worked as a clinician in Germany for 17 years before emigrating—utterly disgusted with the German system—to the UK to work in the National Health Service. He gave me his comments and pleaded with me to make them available to the Government, because he is so alarmed at the thought that he escaped the German system to come over here only to be followed by something rather similar. I will try and draw on his comments as quickly as I reasonably can.
In Germany, the contractual agreement between commissioners and provider organisations define the funding arrangements. Clinical decisions are then strongly influenced by financial incentives. Computer-based algorithms have been developed to guide doctors on what diagnostic interventions and medical treatments patients should receive in order to maximise the income for the provider organisations. These algorithms consider the characteristics of the given patient as well as the characteristics of the broad category of patients with that particular diagnosis in order that the doctor achieves the,
“most profitable average treatment costs across a diagnostic group of patients”.
Is that really what we want in our country?
In Germany, evidence-based medicine and the interest of patients are much less important. In the UK in recent years, the emphasis has been more and more on evidence-based medicine; that is based, of course, on the professional work of NICE, which I have already referred to. If the drive towards competition threatens this ethos, Britain will lose something extremely precious. Competition not only reduce the flexibility needed to provide individualised effective care, but also requires ever-increasing documentation. Ministers often refer to the bureaucracy of the National Health Service, but if they had the experiences of the bureaucracies of other systems, they might be slightly less critical.
This documentation is supposed to ensure that clinicians can demonstrate that these income-generating interventions have indeed been provided. Commissioners mistrust the providers and require more controls and ever more documentation as well. This waste and inefficiency inevitably drives up costs.
Financial incentives and competition encourage commissioners to accept less costly patients. The providers are inclined to do the same. Here is another major fault in the system. As a result, patients with severe and chronic disorders become disadvantaged. It is no accident that mental health services are relatively well funded in this country, when compared to these competition-based systems, though I should emphasise that even in the UK, mental health remains the Cinderella of the health service.
Financial incentives also lead to the prescription of useless treatments—my anecdote makes the point—and the over-provision of services. Apparently, this is widely known across the German system. The providers then argue for the funding for all these unnecessary operations and superfluous services.
Competition and fragmentation of local service systems create the need for more referrals and associated paperwork and further increased costs. There are multitudes of downsides from these financially driven systems. Our consultant concludes that,
“most of these downsides of a more market orientated system appear to be intrinsically linked to the promotion of competition in health care and to having a system based on independently negotiated contracts rather than one controlled by agencies that are directly accountable to the public”.
In this country, we know from other sectors that markets do not work. The name Jarvis will mean something. Jarvis was, of course, the private maintenance company for the rail companies. Jarvis was found negligent following various rail disasters and, of course, Jarvis no longer exists.
Do we really want to generate these risks of negligence in the health sector? Surely not. I realise that at this point in time, the plan is not to go all the way down the rail route, but the direction of travel is extremely clear and I have no doubt that that is where we shall arrive unless there are safeguards within this Bill to prevent it. Some may point to the apparent savings achieved by fundholder GP practices. The evaluators apparently found, however, that GPs bumped up their prescription costs immediately before becoming fundholders by going to special drugs only to return to generic prescribing once they became GP fundholders.
Lord Rea
My Lords, I would like to make a very few remarks on competition versus co-operation from a clinical rather than a legal position, as I am baffled by the complex legality of the amendments on Monitor.
As the noble Earl knows, like many others I have always had concerns about the wisdom of introducing market competition into healthcare. Co-operation and collaboration between providers should always be the norm for the benefit of patients and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has just said, it is much less costly. However, it is good to know that competition is now to be on quality and not on price. This removes, theoretically at least, the race to the bottom which has been shown to result in worse outcomes in a number of studies, particularly, as other noble Lords have pointed out, in the United States.
Recently there have been three studies in the UK on competition in healthcare, of which that by Zack Cooper and colleagues at the LSE, looking at hospital data covering 400,000 admissions from 2003 to 2008, is the largest and the best known. They claim to show that competition on quality can improve the outcome for patients with a myocardial infarction or coronary thrombosis. Although carefully conducted, and allowing for many variables, the paper has been criticised by statisticians for the elementary but common scientific mistake of equating correlation with causation.
The mortality rate certainly did fall in the hospitals deemed to have been involved in choice and competition. They were deemed to be such because they were close to other comparable hospitals, mostly in urban areas. The researchers were unable to measure competition as such, which of course is a weakness of the study. The mortality rates in these hospitals were compared to those in hospitals outside these areas with more scattered populations who were likely to have less choice and to use only one hospital. However, differences in the mortality rate could have been due to a number of clinical and diagnostic factors, unconnected to competition, which applied more to the urban than the provincial hospitals. For instance, the urban areas were more likely to contain teaching hospitals, which often lead on the introduction of new treatments.
Another report deemed to show that competition is beneficial was commissioned by the Royal College of Surgeons. It showed that outcomes for elective surgery at independent sector treatment centres were better than those for similar procedures carried out in National Health Service hospitals that also offered emergency care. This is not surprising, for several reasons. The patients at the ISTCs were younger and in better general health; they came from more affluent areas; and they were less likely to have co-morbidities. Therefore, the surgeons at the ISTCs had a more straightforward task and by concentrating on a few surgical procedures may have become more skilled in that limited area.
There is nothing to stop National Health Service hospitals setting up dedicated wards and teams to concentrate on routine operations, with doctors working in those sections being protected from being diverted to treat more urgent or seriously ill emergency cases. A number of National Health Service hospitals have done this quite successfully, providing treatments at a lower cost than those commissioned from the private sector. Two years ago ISTCs received some 11 per cent more remuneration than the National Health Service for doing the same work. Of course I am aware that the National Health Service sometimes needs the private sector to clear a backlog. However, this should be temporary, if only for economic reasons. As many other noble Lords said, competition is welcome and necessary within the National Health Service but should be between hospitals, clinicians and other providers vying to be judged the best. In most cases there is only a temporary need to use commercial, competitive providers. I hope that these general remarks have helped the debate.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I will intervene only briefly because most of the points on competition were made very eloquently, in particular by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Owen. My amendments would rather more crudely delete references to anti-competitive behaviour. One thing I will draw to the Committee's attention is that the terminology maximises the chances of this going wrong. The earlier version of the Bill referred to “promoting competition”—in other words, encouraging more providers—which was a relatively benign intervention if one believes that that is the way to go. By referring to “preventing anti-competitive behaviour” we are turning Monitor from being an accreditor and promoter of more providers to being the policeman of the nascent market. That will put it in a very vulnerable position.
All competition and sector regulators that have this duty are inevitably faced with appeals, complaints and other interventions by unsuccessful providers or potential providers, which go through a quasi-legal process with the regulator. The Bill provides that if that is not acceptable, the issue may go to the competition authorities, which rely on the general principles of competition and also—as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, eloquently underlined—of procurement law. Therefore, in almost every case of commissioning the allocation of the contract will be opened to appeal on the grounds that it overrides competition. However, as noble Lords said, there are hundreds of thousands of situations where collaboration and integration, vertically and horizontally, and even mergers between providers, would be in the interests of patients. The Minister said that clearly in all cases the interests of patients were the most important issue. Indeed, the very useful document describing Monitor’s role states that the regulations would help ensure that competition is not applied inappropriately, and only ever in the interests of patients. Well, that is what we would all wish to see. I certainly would not wish to deny Monitor the ability to encourage competition, but if there is an appeal against a particular award by a particular commissioning body, Monitor and the higher courts have to be in a position of judging whether or not the award was in the interests of patients. That seems a severe restriction on the ability of Monitor to provide its general services because it will be engaged in all these cases of complaint and appeal.
There are things that would fit in with the Government’s overall philosophy— which in this area I do not happen to share—but that would not open the door to such a multitude of appeals and to the wider application, referred to by other noble Lords, of both general EU and UK competition and procurement law, which would tie large parts of the National Health Service up in knots.
Lord Ribeiro
My Lords, Amendment 278BA in my name will appear later this afternoon under Clause 71. In view of the discussion so far, however, I think it appropriate that I make my comments now.
This is a probing amendment on which I hope the Minister will be able to provide some clarification. The amendment seeks to address the maintenance of quality standards across all qualified providers, be they NHS, private or the voluntary sector, in three key areas. We have heard mention already today about “any qualified provider” and this is the area on I wish to spend some time. One of the current issues with private sector contracts is that when serious complications arise, requiring intensive care facilities, the patients invariably end up in the NHS. Continuation of care is essential in all areas but it is particularly important in the area of surgery. The experience of the independent sector treatment centres in the NHS, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Rea, and others, has not always been a happy one for the medical profession. If the noble Lord, Lord Warner, who has championed their introduction, was here he would have taken some comfort from the recent report that the noble Lord, Lord Rea, referred to.
When I was president of the Royal College of Surgeons I actually instituted a national audit to compare outcomes of care between the NHS treatment centres and the NHS. The Patient Outcomes in Surgery audit was launched in 2007 by the Royal College of Surgeons and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I said at the time:
“This Audit will provide solid evidence as to whether patient outcomes differ between the ISTCs and the NHS. It is imperative that patients receive a sustained, safe and quality service, which is consistent”—
and that is the point, consistent—
“across surgical providers”.
The outcome of the audit, published this October, analysed four operations: hip and knee replacements, hernia and varicose vein surgery across both provider types. It found that the outcomes from the ISTCs were equal to or generally better than the NHS where both elective and emergency patients were treated. Again, the noble Lord, Lord Rea, made the point that the NHS deals with emergency patients as well. The report highlighted the fact that the patients treated in these centres were younger, fitter, healthier and less likely to have co-morbidities than their NHS counterparts, making them a lower risk for complications.
Jan vanderMeulen, professor of clinical epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, points out:
“Independent sector treatment centres treat only non-emergency cases. The separation of elective surgical care from emergency services is likely to have a positive impact on the quality of care, irrespective of whether the elective surgery is carried out by a private company or the NHS”.
This is something that I believe passionately: the exercise of the ISTCs has demonstrated that if we separate functionally elective from emergency care, we will improve the quality of care for patients, irrespective of whether that is done in the private sector or within the NHS.
There is a downside, however, and this was pointed out by Professor Norman Williams, current president of the Royal College of Surgeons, when he warned,
“we need to guard against any drift that could destabilise hospitals. Sicker patients have needs that only a comprehensive hospital can provide”.
There is a danger that if you move a lot of care over to ISTCs and so on you may destabilise the acute services in the NHS.
Baroness Cumberlege
My Lords, I have listened very carefully to the debate. I think that it has been one of the best that we have had. I pay tribute to those who have taken part, and especially to the Opposition, for introducing it so fully.
I, too, have been connected with the health service since 1948. Like the father of my noble friend Lord Owen, my father was a GP. This resonates with what the noble Lord was saying about paying for services. My brother is a consultant and I work daily with the NHS—rather, I wish that it was daily. I run my own business, and, sadly, it is not quite daily. However, I want to declare that I run Cumberlege Connections, and that we do not provide any patient services to the NHS. We provide training for doctors, nurses and those working in the service.
Reading the evidence that has come forward from the King’s Fund, from the Nuffield Trust and from other bodies, nearly all of them have said that the NHS needs to improve. Looking at the research, I think that is absolutely true. We have to look forward: the NHS is facing enormous challenges. Our population is changing; it is getting more diverse, as well as growing older. The NHS needs to innovate and adapt to meet the new expectations of patients.
I have had treatment over the past two years in hospitals and have been very interested in how care was given. However, patients have had to sit in out-patient departments, queuing as my mother used to queue just after the war, when there was rationing. Sir Muir Gray, a very respected member of the medical profession, has said that the out-patient department is a relic of the 19th century. So we have to change. I think of banking—perhaps that is not a very good example at the moment. However, at one time we used to have to queue to get our money at a counter. Then the banks introduced a hole in the wall. I remember Barclays saying, “Our customers are much too important to have to go to the impersonal ‘hole in the wall’; we are going to give them personal service at the counter”. No—the public wanted cash quickly, and they went to the hole in the wall. Now we can do our banking in our sitting rooms. The world is changing so fast, and the NHS cannot be stuck in aspic. We really must move on.
I am, therefore, very interested in the debate and the question of choice. One of your Lordships said the NHS was not a shopping spree, or something like that. However, there is a huge amount of competition within the NHS. Would-be doctors compete for medical schools, for a start. Actual doctors compete for the very best jobs in the NHS. NHS hospitals compete with private practice for consultants’ time and compete with non-healthcare employers to retain nurses. GPs have been partly competing for NHS patients since 1948; so have hospitals since 1991. Companies compete to provide the NHS with new medicines and diagnostics. NHS researchers compete for grants. The NHS competes with schools, prisons and the Armed Forces for public funding. So competition in the NHS is both long-standing and inevitable. It involves not a yes/no ideological choice, but pragmatic and nuanced judgments about how, not whether, to make use of it. Competition gives NHS patients choice. The phrase, “I want a good local hospital” is a familiar refrain, just like the desire for good local schools and shops. Yet the very fact of choice and its implicit challenge, as we have seen in the previous Government’s introduction of independent sector treatment centres, actually shakes up the NHS providers. It is the grit in the oyster that helps to create a better service with higher standards.
Looking at choice and Protecting and Promoting Patients’ Interests, which has been produced by the Department of Health on the role of sector regulation, it was interesting that 81 per cent of respondents wanted more choice in where they are treated; 79 per cent wanted more choice in how they are treated; 75 per cent wanted a choice of hospital consultant in charge of their care; and 75 per cent of respondents wanted a choice of which hospital consultant is in charge of their children’s care. Women and older people, in particular, want to see more patient choice in the NHS. Nine out of 10 people over the age of 55 want to have a greater say in how and where they are treated. So we know that people want more choice, and that choice can go beyond the NHS and into the independent sector; we have got good examples of where that is happening successfully.
It is important that we go with the Government on expanding the opportunities for people to choose the care that they want and where they want it, but we know that if it is going to work well we need a robust economic regulator. That is absolutely essential. That regulator needs to support plurality of provision for NHS patients. In the Bill, we see that Monitor will ensure that tendering to provide services to NHS patients is not unfairly rigged—that is really important; that cost does not take precedence over quality, as has already been said; that the tariff is set independently of politicians in Whitehall, and we do want a very independent regulator; that essential NHS services of patients are protected; and that patient choice is unrestricted without destabilising the NHS. That is what we should be aiming for.
I am grateful to my noble friend for clarifying some of these issues in his opening speech. We have seen problems. We have seen spot-purchasing; that has got to go. We have seen cherry-picking; that has got to go. We have seen a race to the bottom on price; that has got to go.
There is huge merit in the Bill. I see the creation of an independent sector regulator as one of the great benefits in the Bill, which will facilitate the development of a forward-looking NHS that can undertake efficient investment and support sustainable growth. It is right that the Government should set the framework—that is what we are proposing in the Bill—and it is right that the Government should retain oversight of Monitor as it does of other sector regulators.
I had a very interesting conversation with the regulator for the railways. It is interesting how she is managing that business. Many of us will know Anna Walker, who used to be the chief executive of the Healthcare Commission, and have seen her go from one regulator into another, and how she is managing that. There are some good parallels that we can learn from. Looking at telecoms, there was no intention that BT should remain a monopoly, or that it should go. It is still with us, but it gave other people choice, working through a good regulator.
I am very much in favour of what has been proposed. It moves the health service into this century, because a lot of it is still in the last. It will offer patients and the public a far better service than we have now.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
My Lords, I want to ask the Minister questions, although the debate tempts me into other things. I will start with the other things.
I found the debate fascinating. I have also found some of the re-writing of history fascinating. The previous Government introduced competition, and I am very proud of what the previous Government did in rescuing the health service, as my noble friend on the Front Bench said. The reality is that when we introduced ISTCs there was no pricing in the National Health Service. There were no tariffs. Nobody knew what it cost. The amount of money that the private sector charged was substantially reduced because we put a charge on it, but we had to do something to create the market. I have been extremely frustrated by the Minister saying, again and again, that we introduced preference for the private sector. We were taking the very first steps to introduce architecture which could allow the comparison that he now makes in order to get to a level playing field. However, there was nothing there that would have allowed the previous Government to introduce the architecture of a level playing field from the beginning. I remember discussions at the time with organisations such as Bupa which were really concerned that we were bringing down the amount that the NHS would pay them per patient once we introduced tariffs and pricing.
That was a significant development. It then allowed other developments to take place. Yes, it has allowed the Government to take a comprehensive look at all of this, although, as we have been reminded on occasion, the Government did not need ideologically to say that they had to completely open things up. The Government have admitted that 90 per cent of what they wanted to do could have been done without this legislation. I now suspect that the Government wish that they had never embarked on this in the way that they have done. It has actually meant that most people out there think that, following the pause, there will be no competition. Some of them will be surprised by the debate that we have been having today and, indeed, the debate that we had a couple of weeks ago.
The introduction of foundation trusts was very significant and a real revolution. It said that you had to take control in your own area and be responsible for how you were organising hospital services. That principle is very important. Given the changes that the Government are making in allowing the Secretary of State to intervene in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Newton, described earlier, can the Minister assure me that that will not mean that the Government will be tempted to, for example, raid the successful FTs to ensure that they cover up with sticking plaster those which are not succeeding and therefore not take the difficult decisions?
We are having the debate while, outside, there have been significant reports from the King’s Fund and comments from my noble friend Lord Darzi about the challenges in London. Those challenges will demand that the Government recognise that you cannot have comprehensive healthcare that works effectively, let alone efficiently, on every street corner. There will have to be places that specialise in hips and knees. The noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, talked of the efficiency of ISTCs. Although it is within an NHS hospital, there is what is essentially an ISTC in Epsom. The hospital, from what I read, may be having problems generally, but its unit that just does hips and knees is now the most efficient in Europe, if not the world. It has done incredible things to make it so, such as buying a taxi firm so that it can ensure that it gets people there and so does not lose any slots. That, of course, helps with efficiency.
We are going to face very different challenges and the Government have to be careful that they do not introduce architecture that institutionalises the superiority of hospitals. One of my concerns about our discussion is that sometimes we reinforce the centrality of hospitals in the modern healthcare system when we should not. We ought to be embedding the centrality of the patient pathway, which is much more about the patient’s experience before they go to hospital and after they leave hospital than the period—I hope it will be shorter and shorter—that they are actually in hospital. That is where competition will play an increasingly important part. There has to be some sort of regulation of other providers but it has to be done in a way that does not reinforce hospitals. This has been the experience of Monitor to date, so is it going to be most effective to have it regulating other bits of the architecture? There needs to be regulation of the private sector and of the voluntary sector that are providing pieces of patient care. How do we do that in a way that does not reinforce hospital care?
I have been fascinated by today’s discussion of the European Union and whether the NHS will be subject to the competition law. I remember very well, as Housing and Regeneration Minister, trying to negotiate with Mario Monti, who simply did not understand that we would frequently want to give support from the public sector, but to have that matched from the private sector. That was seen as anti-competitive and a real problem. I do not want the NHS to get involved in that architecture. I would love the Minister to comment on what his colleague Simon Burns said in the Commons. Mr Burns agreed that the application of EU competition law was inevitable but also desirable. Does the noble Earl concur with his friend in the Commons?
I have also been fascinated by the discussion around how competition is to be measured and the fact that we are now going to measure competition on quality as well as price. Ideologically I support that absolutely, but I am not sure how you do it, and I want to know how the Minister intends that to happen. What is it that will be measured so that, at a local level, proper decisions that are not contestable in court are made around the wording currently in the Bill? We all want to get there but the reality is that it is very difficult to find an objective measure that will be clear about the quality of patient care. We have a long way to go in terms of getting an architecture that will deliver the health service that the majority of people want to see where the patient is at the centre of every decision. I have been impressed with the foundation trust board that I have joined in Durham and Darlington. The businessmen on the board are saying that if you get patient care right, the financial decisions will become much easier and more straightforward. I believe that but we have to be able to get there. The real problem is that the Government have got so many things confused that people out there do not see it as simple. They see it as a confused and muddled agenda that has objectives which do not look for a patient pathway that is clear and open to the patient, with the patient getting a hold of how they can be more in control of that pathway. That is where we all want to get to. I am just not sure that the Government have got us there.
Lord Ribeiro
Does the noble Baroness agree with me about the pricing of ISTCs? As a surgeon I had a perfectly good idea of the cost of operations in the private sector because I did private work. I also had a reasonable idea of how much it cost in the NHS. One of the principal reasons why the Labour Government introduced ISTCs was to act as the grit in the oyster to challenge the NHS to reduce its costs and to improve the quality of its care. The issue was not just that the Government did not know what the actual price was going to be.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
It certainly was not. I do not believe that the previous Government ever acted just on price, despite what the Minister keeps alleging. The noble Lord might have known what the price was but the price in his hospital was very different from the price in another hospital. One of the problems was that there was massive inconsistency across the health service, and that was being addressed. The Government were also challenging everyone involved in healthcare to be honest about what they were doing and to put patients at the centre, making sure that they got treated more quickly—a very important issue for us and our commitment to the public—and as fairly and as well as possible. We were able to get more consistency by driving through a price mechanism.
Lord Walton of Detchant
Is it not the case that procedures can be more easily and more cheaply carried out in the private sector in many instances than in the National Health Service because the costs in the National Health Service must take into account all the other responsibilities of the NHS, including responsibilities for education and training and many other things in which the private sector is not at present involved?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to what has been a first-class debate. While I will not repeat what I said earlier, the value of this summing up will be in me responding to some of the specific questions and points that have been raised by noble Lords.
The debate has demonstrated broad agreement, if I am not putting words into noble Lords’ mouths—no doubt they will tell me if I am—that competition, when used appropriately, has an important role to play in realising what we all want to see in the NHS. It should be a means of improving the quality of care and productivity in the health service, and of improving patient choice, including choice of treatment. I would like to believe, from what noble Lords have said, that there is no disagreement about that as a general principle. It is consistent with the policies of the previous Government, reflected in published statements on behalf of all the main political parties over the years.
A further area of potential consensus appears to be on the merits of sector-specific regulation that is applicable to both commissioners and providers, with the starting point being the existing principles and rules for co-operation and competition in the NHS, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, made clear.
Speeches from several noble Lords demonstrated the concern that competition law should never be applied to the NHS. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, in particular, expressed that view very forcibly. However, that is not in the gift of the Bill. The Bill provides for Monitor to consider cases of potential breaches of the Competition Act 1998, to undertake market studies and to determine where and when matters should be referred to the Competition Commission for investigation under the Enterprise Act 2002. Establishing concurrent powers for Monitor would not extend the scope of competition law or its applicability to the NHS.
Baroness Thornton
If that is the case, why do 20 clauses in this part of the Bill refer explicitly to the Competition Commission and the panoply of competition law? Should they not be there?
Earl Howe
They are there because this is the first time that any Government have attempted to bring together under one umbrella the disparate parts of our existing system for regulating and controlling competition. As I said earlier, we have that system in skeletal form, but there are lots of gaps and inconsistencies. By bringing them under one umbrella, as this Bill does—I am afraid that it inevitably occupies a goodly number of clauses—we will have a coherent system of regulation for the future.
Establishing concurrent powers for Monitor would not extend the scope of competition law or its applicability to the NHS; that is an important point for noble Lords to appreciate. Why have a sector-specific regulator? For me, the reason is that, instead of such matters being reserved for the Office of Fair Trading, Monitor will be able to lead on these issues in its capacity as a regulator with statutory duties to protect and promote patients’ interests and to enable integration, and as a body with much greater knowledge and expertise of healthcare compared with the Office of Fair Trading. That would include, for example, where arrangements such as clinical networks, which may restrict competition, deliver overriding benefits to patients. Just because there is no competition, that does not mean that the behaviour in question is anti-competitive.
That view was forcibly brought out by the NHS Future Forum. As I have said, competition is just one of the tools available to the commissioner in securing access and improving services, and it will be the commissioner, not Monitor, who will decide where and how to use it. That is not new. The use of competition—for example, through competitive tendering—is already well established in the NHS. A range of providers—NHS, voluntary, and independent—are contributing to improving services for patients.
Of course I understand the passion with which the noble Lord, Lord Owen, spoke; my concern is that his amendments would remove from the Bill a protection for patients in relation to the actions of commissioners. That is very important; if the noble Lord’s amendments were accepted we would have commissioners taking decisions that were not overseen or checked in any way, which would be very dangerous. It would also be a backwards step from the existing principles and rules that apply to primary care trusts and that were introduced by the previous Government. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, said very interestingly that according to his research the French railway system is not subject to EU competition law. I defer to his knowledge of French railway legislation but, as is made clear in the OFT’s recent guidance, the issue of whether competition law applies requires an analysis of the activity in question. To insert a clause into the Bill just to say that EU competition law shall not apply to the NHS would not achieve that aim. EU competition law is a fact, so we have to ensure that the system that we put in place protects patients against breaches of the law and that when breaches do occur they are remedied effectively.
Earl Howe
I shall indeed look very willingly at that question and I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising it. Although I might not appear to be at times, I am very keen to be as open as possible about as much as possible. Whatever I can do to facilitate this I will, although it is not a matter that I have been directly involved in.
Lord Davies of Stamford
Can I take the Minister back to the all-important matter of Monitor? I think he said this morning that he recognised that there were potential conflicts of interest in Monitor’s role. Monitor will continue to have its role of oversight over foundation trusts until 2016. The Minister has said today that that can be continued beyond 2016. Monitor will now be given responsibility for competition policy: in other words, for all the supply side, whether private sector, independent, or foundation trust. Is there not a conflict with Monitor having this responsibility for foundation trusts and then being responsible for the oversight of the rules of competition and the supply side? Monitor will also be responsible for oversight on the other side: the commissioning and customer side. Is this not an intensely problematic situation, and will the Minister say how he intends to resolve these issues?
Earl Howe
My Lords, the noble Lord, not for the first time, is ahead of me. It is no accident that we have a group of amendments that deals with potential conflicts and how these are to be resolved. It might be better, if the noble Lord agrees, to wait an hour or two until we reach those amendments.
My noble friend Lord Newton indicated from his own personal experience that mergers, when they occur, are far too bureaucratic. I fully agree with him. The Department of Health, the Co-operation Competition Panel and, if it involves a foundation trust, Monitor, all currently play a role and may have conflicting views which lead to uncertainty and delay. Our proposals would create a simpler and much more streamlined process for the NHS.
My noble friend indicated his strong view that safety and quality—not competition—should be paramount. I am sure it will not have escaped his notice that improving quality is what these reforms are meant to be about. We have been clear that patients’ interests, especially their safety and the quality of the services they receive, have to be paramount. That is why Monitor’s overriding purpose is to protect and promote patients’ interests. It is why the board will have a duty to improve quality, why the CQC will underpin quality; and why competition will be used only as a means to improve quality. Where there are better ways to improve quality—and there may be—they will be used instead.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, in his extremely interesting and—I do not mean to sound patronising—well-informed speech, took us through some of the intricacies of competition law. Although he did not say this, there has been a suggestion from a number of quarters that we are in a knowledge-free zone when we look at competition laws applied to the NHS. In one sense that is true because there is no case law that can guide us, but in another sense it is not true.
We can say many things with confidence. The point of competition law is to protect people from self-serving abuses like collusion or abuse of market power by restricting access to services. These self-serving abuses that harm patients are already prohibited in the NHS by the principles and rules for co-operation and competition, as introduced by the previous Government. This is not something new introduced by the Bill. Competition law applies to foundation trusts only in so far as they are acting as an undertaking, as my noble friend indicated—in other words, only where they are providing goods and services within a competitive market. Given the lack of directly applicable case law to NHS providers, there is some uncertainty about where that line is drawn.
A body can be an undertaking for some activities and not others. That is very clearly laid out in the OFT’s recent guidance, Public Bodies and Competition Law. For example, the foundation trust might be an undertaking for elective surgery, if it were provided in a competitive market, but it would be very unlikely to be an undertaking when providing NHS services in the absence of competition and while under a licensed obligation to maintain service continuity, which it could well be if Monitor chose to build that into its licence. In so far as foundation trusts may in the future be found to have abused their market power, what would then follow? It is important to understand what the consequences would be. In that situation, Monitor—
Baroness Thornton
Before the noble Earl moves on, I would like to be completely clear. Is the Minister saying that Monitor will decide which parts of the NHS are subject to competition law—and not the Secretary of State?
Earl Howe
My Lords, competition law potentially applies to the provision of services throughout the NHS. Monitor is there to protect patients from breaches of competition law, as it perceives them to be. The noble Baroness is right that it will not be the Secretary of State who makes those judgments. We are charging Monitor with that duty as a sector-specific regulator. I hope I have answered the noble Baroness’s question; if I have not, I am very happy to write to her on that.
In a situation where a foundation trust was found to have abused its market power, Monitor or the OFT would have the power to remedy the breach and impose proportionate sanctions, which might be a fine, or it might be to set aside a collusive agreement or to apply to the courts for a director disqualification. The effect would be to ensure that the anti-competitive conduct and the associated harm were addressed. That can be only a good thing. It is in the interests of patients, and it prevents the whole thing escalating further. The noble Lord, Lord Rea, indicated his doubts that there was any evidence that competition really did drive up quality. If he will allow me, rather than taking up time now, I will write to him, because there is quite a deal of evidence to indicate that it does drive up quality.
On reflecting upon the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked a moment ago, Monitor will not decide whether competition law applies; Monitor will apply the law as it exists. In the end, only the courts will decide the question that she put—certainly not the Secretary of State.
Baroness Thornton
In a way, that goes back to my original question: will the Secretary of State no longer decide, for example, that accident and emergency will be exempt from competition law? Will Monitor decide? Could the noble Earl please be patient with me and give me an example of what will be exempt and what will not be exempt, and who takes that decision? Is he saying that Monitor takes that decision and that if Monitor gets it wrong, the matter goes to the courts?
Earl Howe
Monitor would ask itself: is the arrangement we are looking at for, let us say, an A&E department that had no competition for miles around, anti-competitive? The answer might well be no, it is not. As I said earlier, the very fact that there is no competition to a service does not mean that it is anti-competitive. Monitor will make a judgment on whether the service is operating in the interests of patients. However, I think that we are getting into an area where it would be beneficial to have a letter from me setting out exactly how the law is applied and by whom.
Lord Clement-Jones
I apologise for interrupting the noble Earl. However, to guide the letter, I want to point out that one of the key things is economic activity by the foundation trust concerned. Whether it is engaging in economic activity will, to some degree, be predicated by the behaviour of the decision of the NHS Commissioning Board and the CCGs on whether it is appropriate that there should be a market in particular services from the provider. That gets another actor, or actors, into the equation. This is one of the matters that concerns many of us, because it means that it will be possible in the future, even where no competition currently exists, for competition to be introduced and therefore for Monitor effectively, legally, to have to treat foundation trusts as undertakings.
Earl Howe
My noble friend speaks with great expertise. It would be helpful if I could cover that point when I write, as he suggests.
The noble Baroness has indicated that it would be better to retain the Co-operation and Competition Panel as a separate body. I am very clear that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, and his team have done an excellent job within the Co-operation and Competition Panel since it began its work in 2009. The panel has published important reports on NHS consultants and patient choice; their specific investigations have resulted in direct benefits to patients, such as improved access to primary care in the Kingston-upon-Thames area—that is one that I know of. However, I would not advocate retaining the Co-operation and Competition Panel as a separate organisation, because that would result, in my view, in unnecessary fragmentation and, indeed, duplication. The arrangement we have at the moment has resulted in undue delays and duplication of resources, as the decision-makers have inevitably sought to review the panel’s investigations before taking any action. My noble friend Lord Newton highlighted that issue once again. I have examples in my brief which replicate his experience. Those delays caused unnecessary uncertainty for the NHS organisations involved and their patients. I emphasise again that our proposals would address this by integrating the advisory role of the Co-operation and Competition Panel as a distinct identity within Monitor.
The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, spoke of the searing experience of Mid Staffs. Of course, we all recognise that the problems of Mid Staffs must be looked into carefully. That is going on at the moment and I am not able to say too much for obvious reasons. But the problems at Mid Staffs, as she will be aware, predated its becoming a foundation trust. After authorisation, its governors were new and fairly inexperienced. Learning from what happened, I am confident in saying that quality now plays a critical role in the authorisation process for new foundation trusts. The governance of foundation trusts in which they are accountable to representatives of the public and staff should help organisations to listen and act on feedback. The events at Mid Staffs demonstrated the importance of having strong, transparent and accountable governance arrangements for the safe and effective operation of the trust. The changes we are making should provide greater accountability to the public and staff and increased transparency so that they can better challenge and scrutinise the delivery of local healthcare provision.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones asked what would stop Ministers creating new markets. I hope noble Lords will agree that it must surely be right for doctors and health professionals to want to do the best for their patients. Under this Bill, it would be for commissioners to decide if, when and how to use competition as a means to an end in improving services for patients. The Secretary of State would not have the power to direct commissioners on these matters and the Bill expressly prohibits the Secretary of State exercising his powers to make regulations on commissioning or in setting a mandate to increase market shares for private providers. My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones cited the BetterCare and FENIN cases as an example of how NHS commissioners might act as undertakings. As we have previously made clear, the Government’s view is that the NHS Commissioning Board and CCGs will not be undertakings. Unlike in the BetterCare case, neither the board nor the CCGs will be able to provide services. They will only be responsible for commissioning services for the NHS, which will not be an economic activity for the purposes of competition law.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I apologise. I expressly said that the concerns were not surrounding commissioning but around provision.
Earl Howe
That is helpful. My noble friend and I are clearly in agreement. I apologise if I imputed any different views to him.
The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, indicated that she felt that the oversight powers for foundation trusts should be retained. As the regulator of all providers of NHS-funded services, Monitor will continue regulating foundation trusts under this Bill. These would be enduring functions, not transitional. I hope the noble Baroness is reassured by that. What would be transitional, however, is Monitor’s power to remove foundation trust boards and board members. That is what Clauses 109 to 112 provide for until 2016, although the Secretary of State would be able to extend the transition period by order, as I indicated earlier, if he or she considered it necessary.
My noble friend Lord Ribeiro sought assurances that all providers will work on a level playing field. I am happy to assure him that all providers will indeed be required to meet the same quality standards for the same procedures. Before being qualified, providers will be required to demonstrate that they can meet those quality standards and Monitor will set fair prices for all providers. Competition, as I have said on previous occasions, will be on quality and not on price. If my noble friend will allow, I shall write to him in some detail with answers to his specific questions, which of course were extremely pertinent. I will copy the letter to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate.
The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, also said that the Secretary of State should not raid the budgets of successful foundation trusts. I can assure her that this Bill would not enable the Secretary of State to direct individual foundation trusts or to raid foundation trust budgets, which she has rightly cautioned against. She said that there was a need to ensure that the new system should allow care to be shifted out of hospital. I share her view on that. It is essential that the new system enables more care to be shifted out of hospital into people’s homes and communities. This will require strong commissioning, and that is a key point made by the King’s Fund.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of a foundation trust. It is quite simple for commissioners to be instructed to top-slice, say, 2 per cent of their budget and for the commissioning process to be used to divert money from some foundation trusts to others. What the Minister ignores in his construct of the Bill is the actual practice that is happening in the system at the moment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I do not see how the noble Earl can get away from that. We have recently seen that the Secretary of State, having said that he will not intervene, has made three interventions, twice in relation to PCT behaviour and once in relation to the quality outcomes, and in the last debate the noble Earl said that he would continue to use that mandate in future. It seems to me that we will continue to see these kinds of central interventions. It is as if we were in parallel universes. In one, we have the Bill and the theory. In the other, we have the practical management of the health service. Which is it to be?
Earl Howe
Once again, the word “micromanagement” springs to mind. We want to get away from the Secretary of State micromanaging the health service. On the other hand, we think it is perfectly right and proper for the Secretary of State, on behalf of voters, patients and Parliament, to set broad objectives for the NHS, such as the NHS outcomes framework. That document has been very well thought out by clinicians led by Sir Bruce Keogh in the department and has, I believe, commanded universal approval. Surely this is the territory that the Secretary of State should be on: to drive up the quality of care and the performance of the NHS, but not to micromanage.
I recognise that there are fundamental fears that this Bill would increase the role of competition in the NHS and take us down the road to privatisation. I need to be clear that it is not the intention of this Bill, and I do not believe that it is the effect of this Bill, to privatise the NHS. The Bill reaffirms that the NHS will always be there for everyone who needs it, funded from general taxation and free at the point of use. Extending choice and increasing competition is not about privatisation. We want patients to be able to choose to receive their care from the highest-quality providers. Competition in services, where it is introduced, should only be introduced when commissioners genuinely and for good reasons believe that it will benefit patients and the quality of their care. Should we allow this to happen without any check that it is happening legally and properly? Our answer is no; it needs to be overseen fairly and apolitically by a sector-specific regulator with the interests of patients as its core duty.
As with other parts of the Bill, I am more than willing to enter into discussion with noble Lords on Part 3, and I have already indicated that I am sympathetic to some of the key concerns which these amendments raise. With that in mind, I hope that we can move on and debate different issues arising from this part of the Bill and that noble Lords will feel content for the time being not to press the amendments.
Lord Clement-Jones
The noble Earl said himself that we are clearly in slightly—very—uncharted territory here, and referred of course to the OFT guidance. It is largely a re-run of the 2004 OFT guidance. It is slightly clearer because the case law is slightly more developed, but not a great deal more. We are in the area of assessing risk in terms of the application of EU competition law, domestic competition law and so on. Therefore, in these circumstances, we need the best advice. As I said earlier in my remarks, it is not so much a matter of the department asserting that such-and-such is the case but of having the benefit of some outside, independent legal advice—not that I am promoting the barrister’s profession, being a solicitor. Somebody well versed in competition law should be asked to advise on the risks that I set out at some length earlier today, otherwise we will struggle on with assertion and counter-assertion.
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, this has been an absolutely brilliant debate and very helpful to everybody in the Committee; I hope that that includes the Government. I start where the Minister left off about intentions—it is not the Government’s intention to introduce competition red in tooth and claw. However, the Minister must by now have realised that that is not what people understand by what is actually in the Bill and how it might be applied. That is the dilemma that faces the Committee and the Government. We on these Benches will certainly take up the offer that the noble Earl made in his opening statement, which was extremely useful, of discussing how to improve and change this part of the Bill. We would like to be part of that process. There is definitely work to be done on that.
I will briefly sum up our position on this debate. I have a series of questions for the Minister and I am very happy for him to write to me about them. We are not convinced as yet by the idea that having a quango as an economic regulator is the only way to bring a clear and comprehensive legal framework into the Bill. The purpose of Monitor in the Bill is to develop competition, which is why we have the Bill. We believe, and this debate shows us, that the contents of this part of the Bill in fact open the door and invite in the issues that were raised, for instance, by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. If competition is not at the heart of the Bill, why do we need all that detail? The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, made a very helpful intervention and a useful analysis. I, for one, will be rereading his speech about EU competition law.
I ask that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and his colleagues look at our Amendment 262A, which would add a third subsection to Clause 59(1). The proposed paragraph (c) says the provision of health services should be,
“based on the principles of universality and social solidarity”.
We were not making a particularly left-wing statement with that. We were actually lifting it out of European law, which our advice tells us is one of the ways in which you keep at bay the procurement processes of European law. I strongly ask the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, to look at that; I would be interested to hear his comments.
One part of the debate that I have been disturbed about was that raised by the noble Lord, Lord Owen. He also has a freedom of information request in for information that would help to inform the discussions of this House. We know that we have had our debates about the lack of access to the risk register to help us in our deliberations. Indeed, my honourable friends in another place asked if they could also have access to the legal opinions that the department had got on this part of the Bill, and were refused access to that, too. We have all had to find our lawyers to advise us about competition law. We are now all a lot better informed than we were several months ago. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, was right when he said there is no consensus about this; indeed he was right when he said that parts of this Bill are feared and hated. The Minister needs to understand that there is a lot of fear out there, about this part of the Bill in particular. The noble Lord was expressing very grave concerns.
The noble Lord, Lord Newton, made a threat to the Government about patient safety and quality being the order of the day and said that he will be returning to this on Report. He will probably have more effect than the rest of us put together in his interjection on this matter. We will be behind him if he does so, which may not do his reputation any good at all.
The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, made a very thoughtful speech, her most important point being that we already have the tools to make the system work. There is no need to put in an economic regulator and the competition regime that this Bill suggests, because the tools are already there. That is very important.
I say to my noble friend Lord Whitty that there is absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of slash and burn to make the point about this part of the Bill. In effect my noble friend was at one with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones.
The message from the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, is that the NHS needs to improve. Yes, we would all agree with that and every health system in the world needs to change and improve. I would, however, refer the noble Baroness to my speech, which embraced change, embraced development and even embraced the use of managed competition. Where we part company is that the way to improve the NHS is not to treat it as a utility or a supermarket; we do not think the evidence is there to prove that. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that we should be very wary of the introduction of market forces as a way to improve our health service.
My noble friend Lady Armstrong made the important point that we agree with the Minister that there is a case for the use of competition in its place. The challenge before us is how we ensure that this Bill delivers that without threatening the whole fabric of our health service.
Baroness Cumberlege
Is the noble Baroness aware of Gaynor et al and the work they have done? I quote again from Protecting and Promoting Patients’ Interests: the Role of Sector Regulation, a research study in 2010:
“We find that the effect of competition is to save lives without raising costs. Patients discharged from hospitals located in markets where competition was more feasible were less likely to die, had shorter length of stay and were treated at the same cost”.
Baroness Thornton
All I would say in answer to the noble Baroness is that there is no known health service in the world that shows competition improves health outcomes. I challenge the noble Baroness to send me the information that shows that is the case.
Baroness Cumberlege
The noble Baroness should look at this document and at the research which is stated in it.
Baroness Thornton
We are talking about the whole system, not a small part of it. We can share our intelligence outside the Chamber; the noble Baroness makes a good point but there is no evidence that says this is the way to improve our national health system.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
Perhaps I can be helpful. The noble Baroness referred to a study of the competition element, which was introduced into the British health system by the previous Government, as far as I am aware. That was carefully circumscribed competition. It did not amount to more than 10 per cent. It was based on the insistence that competition be fair in terms of quality, standards and price; it excluded emergency; and it applied only to elective operations. The difference here is not whether competition is beneficial where appropriate. The real question is: where is it appropriate? That is the distinction between the two comments.
Baroness Thornton
My noble friend comes to my assistance in a very appropriate fashion and puts it much better than I did.
Finally, the question that we need to answer is: does the Bill increase the likely interference of competition law in the National Health Service? Does the Bill transfer power from the Secretary of State to Monitor, and is that a good thing? That is why I was pressing the Minister about who takes the decision about where competition law applies.
The Minister said at the outset that Part 3 is misunderstood. He is absolutely right. If the Government really want to put beyond doubt the issue of competition law and its place in the delivery of our National Health Service, we have to simplify, clarify and delete parts of Part 3 of the Bill. We have to take the NHS out of the danger zone of EU procurement law and competition law. That is the challenge that lies before the House when we return to consider this at a later stage in the Bill.
Earl Howe
My Lords, before the noble Baroness sits down, does she accept that European procurement law already applies? I do not think there is any dispute about that. I hope she will welcome my offer to write to cover issues relating to competition law, including giving my view on my noble friend’s suggestion of having an independent legal view. I have not taken a view about that at the moment, but I will gladly consider it.
Baroness Thornton
I accept both the invitation and comments that the Minister has made about procurement law. I refer him back to my comment about opening the door wide and inviting in the lawyers. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Rawlings
My Lords, before we move to the next group of amendments, it may be for the convenience of the House if I remind noble Lords that we will interrupt the debate on this group at a convenient moment shortly before 2.30 pm. The House will then resume and, if necessary, adjourn before we take Oral Questions at 2.30 pm.
Amendment 260EB
Baroness Thornton
“(d) is to take on the further duties as set out in this Act in relation to authorising through licensing any person who provides health care services for the purposes of the NHS as set out in Chapter 3 of this Act.”
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I promise that this will be a very much shorter speech. We now turn to the second group, which concerns Monitor’s function as a licensing provider—a part of the suite of amendments that we have put down about reconfiguring Monitor.
The Bill extends the concept of financial regulation to non-financial trusts, and we can see the logic in this. For consistency, however, we argue that all providers of services to the NHS—not just foundation trusts—should have to meet requirements around their financial position and have this subject to oversight, as well as the obvious fit and proper test that they would have to go through.
We can see the argument for a robust evaluation, for example, of capital structures, which certainly would have been helpful in the case of Southern Cross. The regulator should be allowed to make authorisation subject to this kind of probity test—something like a fit and proper persons test. For us, the key aspects of the licensing regime should be determined by the Secretary of State, not by the regulator. The job of the regulator in our view is to operate the system, not to define it. I would invite the Minister to say whether he agrees with that analysis.
With foundation trusts we set out that Monitor shall use the licence to ensure that information flows to the regulator to enable it to have effective oversight and to intervene if necessary. The licence has to extend this to other sorts of providers which may be reluctant to supply information or submit to the idea of intervention. They may claim commercial confidentiality. The Bill resolves this problem, as far as we can see, by simply having no oversight—in other words, the “nothing to do with us, guv” approach to regulation. We believe that the public would not accept this. The Mid Staffs example, where Monitor came into much criticism, or the Southern Cross example might be instructive here.
Baroness Murphy
I am sorry to interrupt. The situation at Mid Staffs arose following the approval of the Department of Health and the Healthcare Commission. It was passed to Monitor as a fit and proper hospital. The scandal emerged only three weeks after it was approved by Monitor.
Baroness Thornton
The point I am making concerns what we need to do for the future. What happened in Mid Staffs has some bearing on that and I said “instructive”.
The tests that we are suggesting should be applied to any organisation wishing to supply clinical services to the NHS around probity and can be enforced through contracts and licensing. Meeting the conditions without trying to argue commercial confidentiality is now the price of doing business with the NHS, in our view.
Finally we have reservations about the interaction between the licensing regime and the use of standard contracts. Why have both as enforcements? What would be appropriate for each? What is the role of Monitor as regards the contracts? What happens to disputes between providers and commissioners? Do they all go to court? What is the role for Monitor in the resolution of disputes? We have accepted that if you have a licensing system then you have to build a bureaucracy to support it, moving from a top-down management bureaucracy to a regulatory bureaucracy. To keep this to a minimum while remaining effective is not simple, as the CQC is finding. But the system set up in the Bill is very complicated and our amendments seek to simplify it. The nature of the operation as to whether it should be a light-touch risk-based approach or continuous direct inspection is another issue which has plagued the CQC and will have to be resolved by the new Monitor. That is a question we need to put on the table.
I now turn to our amendments. In Amendment 260EB Monitor is to take on duties in relation to authorising through licensing any person who provides healthcare services for the purposes of the NHS. Amendment 279A is to remove any potential ambiguity and stress that providers of primary medical services for the purposes of the NHS must hold a licence. Clause 82 stand part is to facilitate a discussion about who can be exempt from the requirement for health service providers to be licensed and who makes those decisions. In Amendment 282A, since this a strong power granted to Monitor to revoke a licence, we add qualifications that in the case of a foundation trust Monitor must consult the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State may veto any revocation if it is deemed not to be in patients’ or taxpayers’ interests. In Amendment 282B the Secretary of State, not Monitor, should determine the principles or framework behind the licensing conditions and Monitor must then have regard to these. Amendment 283 specifies that the standard conditions included in each licence must set out various minimum standards such as for governance arrangements, meeting in public, employment conditions, co-operation with local-authority overview and scrutiny functions. Amendment 283A contains the issue of there being no need to have different standard conditions for different descriptions of licences.
Amendments 286ZA, 287ZA and 287ZB set limits on Monitor’s functions to set and modify the licence conditions, simplifying its role. Amendment 287BA leaves out the roles of Monitor relating to licence conditions, price and charging. Amendment 287F requires licence holders to be fully subject to the overview and scrutiny functions of local authorities. In Amendment 288ZB Monitor has the power to modify the standard conditions applicable to all licences, and in doing so there should be no need for a vote among providers but consultation and consent from the Secretary of State is required. In Clauses 99 and 100 stand part we raise the issue of minimising the bureaucracy surrounding licensing. In Clause 101 stand part we argue that the requirements for fair eligibility and transparency in selection should be covered under the PRCC. This is a probing amendment designed to strengthen the clause instead of deleting it on Report. We think that that should be a matter for discussion. Amendment 288DZA regards Monitor’s power to impose discretionary requirements, including fines, on providers and licence holders if they fail to provide required documents or information, which can only occur with the consent of the Secretary of State. Any fine must be held by the local CCG for reinvestment in services in that area. Amendment 288DA states that if any provider is in breach of a licence Monitor may take action against them, including the imposition of fines, but only with the consent of the Secretary of State. I beg to move.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
I would like to address just one of the amendments in this group, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames. Unfortunately my noble friend has been taken ill and is unable to be here. He extends his profound apologies to the Committee.
This amendment is significant in strengthening the general approach towards competition under Section 3 of the Bill, by making it quite plain that the requirements that have to be met, which we will come to in Part 4, must also apply to licence holders. I am in a slight difficulty, as my noble friend Lord Howe will appreciate, as the Government have tabled amendments on aspects of foundations trusts which will arise at a later stage in the Bill, particularly under Clause 161, which are related to the amendment to which I am now speaking. I will therefore do my best to navigate around Clause 161 in so far as I can. However, I may have to make limited reference to it in order to make clear what my own amendment is about. My own amendment is essentially one that would support, and indeed further improve, the proposals put forward in this particular amendment. They should therefore be read together with Clause 161 and Amendments 299ZA and 299AZA in the name of the Government.
We want to make two requirements as a fundamental part of the requirements that licence holders have to meet. We appreciate that, in many ways, the licence-holding requirements are fundamental to the way in which the Bill operates, because it must be the case that providers are brought within the general structure of the Bill itself. Our amendment makes two particular points about that. The first is that the revenue from private patients, as a percentage of the licence holder’s total revenue, must be kept below 50 per cent. Secondly, and at least as importantly, the number of private patients in a foundation trust hospital must also be kept below that proportion.
The main point of this amendment—I think that it is an important one—is again to establish that we are looking at foundation trusts that are part of the provision under the NHS and that a minority of both income and patient numbers would be required for any provision made. We hope, as I think the noble Baroness said, that this set of requirements continues well beyond 2016 as part of the structure of the relationship of foundations trusts to the health services, and that this is therefore not standing alone but a crucial part of the whole strategy.
If the noble Lord, Lord Owen, were in his place, I would say that if this is not the rail track of the French railways, it is at least the rolling stock, and we need both to have an effective railway service. However, I wanted to say one other thing. The first part of the amendment tabled this morning by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, goes a very long way. We will talk about this in more detail later so I shall only sketch it out now, given the time. I think that the first part of the amendment, with regard to income—and indeed the requirement that income must exceed the costs of providing that income, and that it must be used for the purposes of patients within the health services—is a very full and useful advance. It is very close to the phrasing of the 2006 Act, which is a point that I am sure will come across to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and her colleagues, but with the additional wording that makes it, if anything, even stronger.
The noble Earl, Lord Howe, will know from discussions which I and my colleagues have had with him that we would want to see this supplemented, if possible, by a reference to the proportion of patients in foundation trust hospitals. Quite broadly, that is something the public can understand, whereas references to quite complicated percentages of income, although equally important—if not more so—are perhaps less transparent and less apparent.
I will not pursue further the new amendments beyond welcoming them, but I want to advance this particular, although limited, amendment as thoroughly as I can, as I think it would ensure that licence holders were held to the same kind of requirements that we are imposing upon Monitor, the national Commissioning Board and the CCGs. It must be the case that this should be a common approach across the front.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I shall be brief. I wish to speak to Amendments 281A and 288ZA, to support my noble friend on Amendment 287EA and to speak to Amendment 287A.
Amendments 281A and 288ZA deal with what are clearly major decisions that will be made by Monitor. The first is the exemption from licensing, which requires notice to be given, and the second deals similarly with the particular standard licence conditions that may be modified. Currently the Bill provides for 28 days’ notice to be given, but these are major issues, and although this is a probing amendment, I hope that the Minister will be able to give a good explanation as to why this period should be so short. Obviously one does not want to have undue delays, but there are quite a number of stakeholders who are bound to be involved in this and it does look rather like a rushed job. So this amendment provides for 90 days to be the standard term for notice to be given.
I move on to Amendment 287A. This amendment simply permits—indeed, requires—the insertion of a standard condition in the licence that the licence holder should,
“abide by the seven general principles of public life set out in the First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life”—
the so-called Nolan principles—and requires,
“the declaration of any financial interest the licence holder may have in a commissioning decision by a clinical commissioning group”.
Nowadays that is increasingly standard. I will not prolong the debate, as we have already had considerable discussion in the course of this Bill about conflicts of interest and the need for transparency in these circumstances. However, I would have thought that licence holders, who essentially will be providers across the whole service, should be under a heavy duty of transparency in order to ensure that they do not have a conflict of interest.
Coming to Amendment 287EA, my noble friend Lady Williams has eloquently set out the issues. What is really required in these circumstances is for the Minister to rebut the presumption that we not only need a provision about the actual total revenue, but also about the number of patients actually treated by a provider. This provision is a belt and braces against the provisions of EU competition law. It is extremely well drafted. I take no credit at all for that, it is my noble friend Lord Marks at work here. We will be discussing the Minister’s very welcome amendment later, but it does not contain the second limb of this particular amendment. It would be useful if the Minister could address this in due course, whether under this group or in the later group, as I recognise the difficulty that my noble friend Lady Williams has also recognised, that this is not grouped with Amendment 299A and probably should be.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I have amendments in this group and in light of the previous debate I do not want to repeat anything, except that the Minister stressed the importance of driving up quality and these amendments relate to what should be incorporated in a licence that Monitor gives a provider. Amendment 282ZB is replaced by Amendment 282ZC, which is about being a good employer. If you are going to drive up quality you have to make sure that your staff have education and training and understand research. However, it goes right the way through from every provider at every level, right up to specialist training. It is important that the education and training needs of those who are in the higher professional training bands are also accounted for. Monitor will have to work closely with Health Education England to provide an oversight of the numbers of education and training places available.
The background to this amendment is very compatible with Amendment 278BA tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, who is not in his place but has already spoken to it. The amendment should not have any great implications on the levy and I note that the Government are already committed to undertaking extensive work to establish an appropriate NHS training levy. I suggest, however, that supervision and training of all staff at all levels is essential and I hope the Minister can confirm that licensing will go further than simply, as it states on the face of the Bill at the moment, having regard to education and training.
In Clause 93, Monitor is required to publish draft standards conditions for the licence requirement and Amendment 285ZA, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hollins, requires somebody to state what primary medical services are to do. If Monitor is not to do it, I respectfully ask the Minister who is. What is to be their availability? How will they work with pre- and post-hospital care? A reappraisal and revalidation will look at clinical standards but there are real difficulties if more goes out into the community. Who is going to see patients with complex conditions at home, how are the deficits in out-of-hours care to be driven up and who is responsible for what? It also requires a duty of collaboration, because if you do less in the hospital sector you need to increase your collaboration, not decrease it.
We have already debated the importance of staff being involved at local and national level to work for the benefit of the wider NHS. As background to this amendment, may I give a short example of why integration between primary and secondary care and social care is absolutely essential? Take a child who the nursery, perhaps, reports is behaving oddly. The general practitioner refers the child to paediatrics, they consult their developmental colleagues—speech and language therapists and psychologists—and an overall conclusion is that this child is neglected but also has some pathology, such as glue ear and delayed speech. The child comes from a home in which there are no books and no one is talking to him or her. For the GP and all other services to link there must be integrating care; that is why it is stressed in the context of this amendment.
The last amendment in this group in my name is Amendment 287AA, which relates to indemnity. Currently foundation trusts carry vicarious liability for clinical care provided by their staff and therefore need to cover claims arising from this work. The trust can seek a source of indemnity from providers other than the NHS Litigation Authority but does not have to and does not have to publish whether or not it does.
The Medical Defence Union has already questioned the indemnity of any qualified provider with the Department of Health and had a response outlining that the NHS standard contract requires providers to have indemnity with a specific requirement set by local commissioners. The levels would vary according to the circumstances of different providers. But that response misses the point. I am not suggesting that the Bill should set the level of indemnity, but we should ensure that all providers of care to NHS patients have indemnity in place so that patients do not go uncompensated. The indemnity should be adequate and appropriate and this cannot be done under separate rules or regulations. The concern is that if a contractor goes out of business for whatever reason and does not have appropriate ongoing indemnity, there will be no course of redress for patients who have been harmed by that individual contractor.
There is a real prospect that patients who are severely or negligently damaged by an individual who does not carry adequate indemnity would then be completely unable to gain compensation because the way that the Bill is written does not require there to be adequate indemnity for the service provided. The long-term nature of clinical indemnity claims means that the level of indemnity must be adequate to provide compensation, sometimes many years into the future when a claim is settled or because sometimes the harm done does not emerge for some years. An indemnity, therefore, has to be in place when a provider is no longer in existence.
I will not elaborate any further on this because it is a discussion I would be interested in having with the Minister outside the Chamber and I am aware that we are time-restricted for this group of amendments, but I hope that the Minister will be able to consider the importance of indemnity for those providers that contracts are placed with and even for those they may sub-contract to.
Police: Officer Numbers
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many police officers are currently employed by police forces in England and Wales and how many were employed in May 2010.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)
My Lords, police personnel data are collected on a financial year cycle. Published statistics show that there were 139,110 full-time equivalent police officers in England and Wales as at 31 March 2011. This compares with 143,734 as at March 2010.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord. He will be aware that police authority grants for the next financial year show a £700 million cut in real terms, which is part of the 20 per cent cut front-loaded over a four-year period. How can the Government continue to claim that these cuts are not having an impact on front-line policing when the latest statistics show a worrying rise in crime? What does the noble Lord have to say about that?
Lord Henley
My Lords, first, I remind the noble Lord that we have a deficit and that must be tackled by seeking better value for money from every public service. That includes the police. There is no need for the noble Lord to make signs of that sort.
I accept that there has been a decline in police numbers, but there is no need to get fixated on this. At the same time, we have seen over the period that I mentioned—March 2010 to March 2011—a decline in recorded crime of 4 per cent.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
My Lords, will the Minister tell us the cost of appointing police and crime commissioners and how many front-line officers that would represent?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I have always accepted that there is a cost to appointing police and crime commissioners, but we believe they will bring accountability. Accountability will be good for that service, and we will get even better value for money.
Lord Howarth of Newport
Does the noble Lord think it is good value for money if the crime rate is going up?
Lord Henley
I have just quoted the figures relating to the period that I cited in the original Answer, which showed that recorded crime is going down.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
What progress is my noble friend making with cutting down on the amount of bureaucracy that the police have to get involved in—form filling and so forth—rather than getting out on the streets and deterring crime?
Lord Henley
I am very grateful to my noble friend for raising the question of bureaucracy. That is what my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has done in announcing a package of policies that will cut police red tape, saving some 3.3 million police hours per year. That is the equivalent of some 1,500 police posts.
Lord Jopling
My Lords, will the noble Lord answer yes to my question as to whether he will look at the pathetically low number of not only police officers but all emergency service workers who have been vaccinated against things such as smallpox and anthrax when the Olympic Games next year will clearly give us a dangerous situation so far as potential biological attacks are concerned?
Lord Henley
I hope I will be able to answer yes to my noble friend in due course. I will have to look at those figures, but I am unsighted on them at the moment. If my noble friend is prepared to accept it, I will write to him in due course.
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, when I asked the noble Lord’s predecessor but one about the retiring of more senior police officers and how this would have an adverse impact on people such as the terrorism support officers, I was told that a central register would be kept of how many were going, so that it did not have a disproportionate effect if they were taken from each police area. Where do we stand on that now? Has it had a disproportionate effect or are we managing to keep a balance across all the police areas?
Lord Henley
My Lords, again, I am somewhat embarrassed in that I cannot answer the noble Lord’s precise question. I will certainly look at that, but I have not been made aware of any problems in that area. If I have not been made aware of them, I suspect that there is not a problem in that field. If I am wrong, of course I will let the noble Lord know.
Lord Laming
My Lords, the Minister will recognise that police forces across the country have been very successful in developing specialist child protection teams. In the current financial situation, some of these teams are extremely vulnerable. Can the noble Lord assure the House that he will use his good offices to protect these highly specialised and very important teams?
Lord Henley
The noble Lord is right to draw attention to the specialist work done by individual police forces. It is obviously a matter for each individual police force and the police authority to decide on the appropriate priorities. Certainly within the Home Office, we would want to encourage them to continue with that work.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I apologise to the House for missing the start of the Question. I had forgotten that Prayers were earlier today.
Police officers tend to retire at a relatively early age. For their own satisfaction, as well as thinking of the public purse, can the Minister say anything about continuing to make use of their expertise and experience, which is the product of both years and public investment?
Lord Henley
My Lords, obviously the training of an individual policeman is a very expensive process. We want to get maximum use of all policemen for as long as possible. Your Lordships will have noticed that some of the policemen who operate around this House tend to be at the older end of the spectrum. We are grateful for their expertise in providing protection for this House. Perhaps, as my noble friend Lord McNally implies from a sedentary position, they all look rather young to us. However, we do want to get as much use as possible out of all those policemen who have trained at such considerable public expense.
Lord Geddes
Can my noble friend advise how long the delay is in the present climate for an officer passing all the hurdles and being promoted to sergeant? How long does that person have to wait before he achieves that rank?
Lord Henley
My Lords, I am facing a lot of difficult and technical questions, which I have to say I cannot answer in the manner in which I would want. I am grateful to my noble friend for putting that question, but I will have to write to him with an answer.
Lord Dholakia
My Lords, there has been considerable effort made to recruit police officers from the black and ethnic minority communities. Can my noble friend indicate whether there has been any problem in retaining such officers and any reasons for that?
Lord Henley
My Lords, as my noble friend has made clear, considerable efforts have been made to increase the diversity of the police force. All police forces have made considerable gains there. I am not aware of any problems of retention, but if my noble friend has any evidence of that, I would be grateful to hear from him. That would then obviously be a matter that we would have to address.
Adoption
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness King of Bow
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are taking to speed up the adoption process.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, the Munro review and the Family Justice Review will help us to build the capacity of the social work profession and speed up the family justice system. The Government have appointed Martin Narey as ministerial adviser and established a ministerial advisory group. We have issued revised statutory guidance on adoption. To improve transparency, we have also published data on the performance of local authorities. We are committed to speeding up the adoption process, and will take further steps, as necessary, to do so.
Baroness King of Bow
I welcome the Government’s efforts to improve the life chances of our most vulnerable children, but does the Minister share my concern that adoption of children with more complex needs—often older children, those who have suffered abuse or neglect—is often delayed because the Government will not provide funding for post-adoption services? Instead, we say to adopters, “You pick up the pieces. You look after a difficult child no one else will take and you pay for their specialist medical health requirements”. Will the Government and the Minister review that funding policy so that we give our most vulnerable children the chance of a loving home?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I agree with the noble Baroness about the importance of trying to address the problem of how one finds places for older children. In particular, there are a number of groups—disabled children, sibling groups and older children—which, as the noble Baroness will know much better than me, suffer from those problems. I will certainly relay the points that she has made to my honourable friend Mr Loughton. I know that he is delighted that the noble Baroness has kindly agreed to serve on the ministerial advisory group. He is very grateful, and I am sure that he will pursue those points with her as part of that.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, at Barnardo’s, of which I am vice-president, we have found that children who are adopted are more likely to have entered care because of abuse and neglect; 72 per cent of children who were adopted enter care for this reason. Because of the damage that they have endured, they need access to age-appropriate emotional and mental health services. Can my noble friend the Minister tell the House what steps the Government are taking to improve the capacity of the care system to support children and young people who have suffered neglect and abuse?
Lord Hill of Oareford
Again, I think that this is an important point. Across the piece, we are trying to take a number of different measures to address some of these issues, whether it is speeding up the adoption process, trying to raise the quality of the social work workforce or working with charities and other voluntary organisations such as Barnardo’s. There are a number of ways in which we have to work. The Government have made a priority of tackling this problem and we will continue to come forward with proposals as to how we might best achieve that.
Lord Turnberg
My Lords, a two-and-a-half-year average delay in the adoption of a child at this very vulnerable age is devastating for that child and may have disastrous consequences. Although some delay may be necessary in order to make a proper assessment of the suitability of adoptive parents, can anything be done to reduce the rather long delays in the judicial processes? Can we also do something about removing the unhelpful barriers to white parents adopting black children? There is a rather large number of black children who are hanging around waiting and we should not be putting up barriers.
Lord Hill of Oareford
The noble Lord is absolutely right that black children have particular problems in finding adoptive parents and that the results for them, in terms of finding adoptive parents, are far worse. Their chances are half as good as they are for other children, and that is clearly a problem. We have sought to make it clear that the colour of someone’s skin should not be a bar to them adopting. If one can find parents where all sorts of things all fit into place that might be better for the child, but the most important thing is a loving parent. In terms of delays in the court process, the Family Justice Review looked at that and has come up with recommendations that we should aim to spend no more than six months on the court side of the process. That would address the problem that the noble Lord has rightly identified.
Lord Elystan-Morgan
My Lords, desirable though it is that a Government should prudently plan and estimate the number of appropriate adoptions in England and Wales in a year, and appropriate though it be that every effort should be made to ensure that there is an available stock of would-be adopters, does the Minister nevertheless agree that adoption is an order of the court of such crucial importance that it should only be made in the light of the specific facts of that particular case, bearing in mind the interests of the child and taking into account the whole of its life?
Lord Hill of Oareford
The noble Lord is exactly right: one wants to adopt a balanced approach to adoption. The fact is that the number of children being adopted has unfortunately been falling. Of around 3,000 children in care under the age of one last year, only 60 were placed in adoption. There are things that we ought to do to redress the balance, but the noble Lord’s underlying point is clearly important.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, the Government’s proposals will remove legal aid entirely from some 35,000 families a year who are in court for one reason or another concerning their children. Are the Government not concerned that without legal representation there will be severe delays in the hearing of these care cases, including children for whom the plan is adoption, adding further to the delay for these children?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, CAFCASS has an extremely important role to play in giving support through the legal process to the families and the children who are going through this process, and that support through CAFCASS remains in place.
Baroness O'Loan
My Lords, does the Minister have any information about the consequences in terms of the number of children adopted following the closure of children’s adoption agencies consequential to the sexual orientation regulations?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, I am aware of the number of Catholic adoption agencies that have had to reorganise to carry on performing their important role. I would be the first to recognise that the Catholic adoption agencies, in particular where disabled children are concerned, have a very proud and long record. However, very few of them have had to reconstitute themselves to comply with those regulations—I believe it is actually only one. I know that there were concerns about that, and I am glad to say that the vast majority have managed to accommodate the regulations and to carry on with the important services that they provide.
Health: Cancer
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they will take in response to the findings of Professor Colin Pritchard’s study published recently in the British Journal of Cancer.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, this study concerns mortality. We have a good track record on reducing cancer mortality. However, because mortality rates are linked to incidence rates, mortality on its own is not a useful measurement of NHS performance. Survival rates are much more effective as they show how good the NHS is at diagnosing and treating people with cancer. We know that our cancer survival rates lag behind the best performing countries, and our ambition is to improve survival rates and save 5,000 additional lives per year by 2014-15.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I recognise what the noble Baroness says about survival rates, but does she agree that the report demonstrates that in the past 10 years cancer services in the UK have improved dramatically? While England and Wales spend less on health than most other countries—9.3 per cent of GDP compared with 10.7 per cent in Germany and 15 per cent in the USA—they achieved the biggest overall annual fall in cancer deaths, and cancer deaths are important to people in this country as well as cancer survival rates.
Baroness Northover
The noble Baroness is right; there has been that decline. Of course mortality is extremely important, but you have to look at incidence, survival and mortality together. She will also be aware that much of that decrease in mortality is because of the decrease in men smoking. Men took up smoking in larger numbers than did women. The numbers of men smoking started to decline in the 1950s, and that has had an effect on the decline in the number of cancer deaths.
Lord Aberdare
My Lords, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, accounting for about 5 per cent of all cancer deaths. A recent report by Pancreatic Cancer UK found that survival rates for pancreatic cancer patients in the UK—only 3 per cent are expected to live for five years or more—are worse than in most comparable countries and have not improved in 40 years. What assurances can the Minister give that the NHS will continue to work to improve results in all forms of cancer and that pancreatic cancer sufferers will not just be written off as a lost cause?
Baroness Northover
Pancreatic cancer is an extremely difficult cancer to diagnose. As the noble Lord knows, when it is picked up it is often very advanced and survival rates are very poor indeed. The Government are well aware of the problems here. My honourable friend Paul Burstow in the other place is meeting Pancreatic Cancer UK shortly. I hope that the noble Lord will feed into that. If he has an association with that organisation, can he put his questions to it so that they can be fed to Paul Burstow, or alternatively to me?
Baroness Gardner of Parkes
My Lords, is it not a fact that the great improvement in cancer treatment is due to early detection? It is important to keep people trained in that, particularly for the rare cancers that I am always talking about. Do the Government not feel that we owe a great deal to the cancer and research charities that are continuing to do very useful work in alerting people to the need for early detection?
Baroness Northover
My noble friend is absolutely right. We owe a huge amount to the organisations in the United Kingdom, not least Cancer Research UK, which is a major player internationally. She is also right about early diagnosis. That is how you start to bring deaths down; you make sure that you diagnose early enough so that you can intervene in a way that is going to be much more effective. Noble Lords might like to know that there will be a first ever national cancer campaign on bowel cancer to flag up the symptoms to people in the hope that they seek diagnosis at a much earlier stage, because if it is caught early it is completely curable.
Lord Winston
My Lords, the complex paper by Professor Pritchard also looks at the costs of delivering cancer care. One of the points made very clearly in that paper is that the cost of drugs delivered under the NHS is considerably less. We pay far less for the excellent results that we get than Germany, Spain, Italy and France do—as much as 40 per cent less, in some cases. Given that, and given that independent assessments of the health service show that the British health service has some of the best value for money in the world, why did the Prime Minister say that we cannot go on as we are and introduce the current Health and Social Care Bill?
Baroness Northover
I fully agree that the National Health Service is very cost-effective and that it has been an extraordinary service. However, we have many challenges coming down the track, as the noble Lord will be acutely aware—not least our ageing population, which needs to be supported, particularly at home and in the community where appropriate, and not immediately taken into hospitals, where interventionist care may not be in the best interests of those patients. Therefore it is extremely important that there is more clinical judgment on the best interests of each patient and how these things are organised, and that they are not simply driven forward by the way in which provision is organised at the moment, which is very much focused on secondary institutions.
Lord Sharkey
My Lords, the biggest cause of cancer deaths in the country is still lung cancer. It kills more people every year than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined, yet lung cancer attracts only 5 per cent of cancer research funding. The Minister has said that this is unsatisfactory and thinks that it is largely due to the lack of first-class research proposals. Does the Minister agree with me that we should not let this situation continue, with the biggest killer getting the least research? Will the Minister consider urgently sponsoring a meeting of all interested parties to see how we might intervene to generate many more fundable first-class cancer research proposals?
Baroness Northover
My noble friend raised this with my other noble friend Lord Howe, who has taken a slight break in the health Bill at the moment. I was struck by his answer, which was on the paucity of cancer research funding for lung cancer. I therefore have more information for my noble friend, which is that the amount spent on lung cancer between 2006 and 2010 in fact doubled in comparison with a 28 per cent increase for overall cancer research spending. The National Institute for Health Research, for example, is currently hosting 62 studies on lung cancer that are being set up or are just beginning to recruit patients. I hope, therefore, that my noble friend will be encouraged that there appears to be a shift. However, if my noble friend would like to write to my other noble friend the Minister with detail about the meeting that he would like, the Minister would be delighted to receive that letter.
Loan Companies: Interest Rates
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Mitchell
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they plan to take action to cap the interest rate charged by finance companies offering payday loans.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)
My Lords, there are real concerns about these loans, but capping interest rates is not necessarily the solution as it could reduce access to licensed credit and force some consumers into the arms of illegal loan sharks. We have commissioned research to look at the impact of capping the total cost of credit that these lenders can charge. We are having discussions with the industry on ensuring that existing codes of practice contain real enhanced consumer protections to address concerns that blight this market.
Lord Mitchell
I thank the Minister for that reply. Some 3.5 million people in this country use payday loans. Yesterday I decided to become one of them. I applied for a loan for £300 over a 21-day period. I went on a very friendly website and filled out all the forms very quickly. It told me that if I clicked the button, I would have £300 in my bank account in 15 minutes. I had to repay, in three weeks, the sum of £369, which is an annualised interest rate of 4,200 per cent. I did not click the website. Will the Minister say whether the Government plan to regulate this industry? There are a lot of very desperate, vulnerable and gullible people out there, and I think that they need help.
Baroness Wilcox
I thank the noble Lord for his personal intervention on this question. No doubt consumers should not be swayed by promises that they will have the money in their banks in minutes. This may well be true, but before taking out one of these loans they should stop and think. Most people handle payday loans very well—we are rather good at handling credit in this country—but at the moment we are going through tough times and more people are borrowing fast, quickly and just for a couple of days. Of course, we all know that APR is annualised up and therefore most people pay about £50 or £60 for the couple of days that they need the money. Without doubt, there are concerns around payday loans such as rolling over old loans into new, businesses using continuous-payment authority to take money out of people’s bank accounts when they are not expecting it and a real lack of transparency about how these loans work, as the noble Lord has just shown. We have started discussions with the industry on ensuring that its existing codes are working and being enforced, and we are now looking at the total cost of credit. Bristol University’s Personal Finance Research Centre is to carry out research to identify the impact on consumers and businesses of introducing a cap on the total cost of credit, as referred to by the noble Lord.
Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the most important part about any new code is that it makes it absolutely clear to the borrower from the start how much the loan is going to cost and what other consequences might arise from late payment?
Baroness Wilcox
My noble friend was not only the Minister for Consumer Affairs but the chairman of the National Consumer Council for some years, so if she speaks on this subject we know that she speaks with authority. She is absolutely right; to be an informed consumer is the most important gift that we can give to people when they make purchases or take out a loan. We have started discussions with the industry to check that people are giving out the right information, and in April next year we will move free advice to the Money Advice Service, which will be co-ordinating debt advice across the country.
Baroness O'Loan
My Lords, in light of the reductions in welfare benefits coming down the road, are there any plans to address the critical period of debt and introduce effective regulations that will require advertisements in the windows of these money shops to say exactly what a loan will cost? For example, if you borrow £100 for a month it will cost you £X. That sort of information would immediately alert people to the risks that they are running. We cannot afford to wait for commissions of inquiry and academic research about something that, as the noble Baroness has said, is a long-standing problem.
Baroness Wilcox
The Office of Fair Trading is always vigilant and always has its eyes on this to make sure that the information is out there. That is a particularly good piece of advice, however. I will see whether this is being done and, if not, what we can do to take it forward.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness when she says that we need informed consumers, but will she agree that for a Government to say that people should stop and think before they take these loans demonstrates that someone is out of touch? These people are desperate and poor and they have nowhere else to go, which is why they need good regulation and assistance.
Baroness Wilcox
After six years as chairman of the National Consumer Council and seven years as the president of the Trading Standards Institute, I am sorry if I gave the impression that I take it casually that people should get into trouble in this way. I apologise if that is the impression that I gave. There is no doubt that the biggest worry in all this is that capping, or any other similar action that we take, will lead to the poorest and most vulnerable people having to go to illegal moneylenders, where the punishment if they do not pay is not always visible. All the time that they can borrow money legally—no matter how high the interest, no matter how wrong the way in which they are borrowing it is—we can at least be there to help them out of the trouble they get into.
Devolution (Time) Bill [HL]
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Health and Social Care Bill
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, I appreciate that this procedure is not common, but it is not novel. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, is seeking to contribute to the continued debate. May I suggest that Peers who are attempting to leave should do so by the other door, and preferably not by that door—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Borrie—so that she can stand and be heard by the House?
Baroness Murphy
Thank you very much indeed. I just want to comment briefly on the amendments on licensing. Some of them are asking quite a lot of the licensing procedure, but there may be other mechanisms that achieve what they want to achieve. I am sympathetic to people’s desire to add these conditions, but I think that it is important to see the licensing arrangements as part of the system, in conjunction with registration with the CQC. It enables Monitor to approve the compliance arrangements to achieve good governance and the information requirements needed to monitor that the organisations are delivering the right standard of care.
The threat of licence revocation enables Monitor to pick up at an early stage the problems of quality and finance which other people have spoken about. Obviously the providers will be very concerned to hold on to their licence, which seems to be a very powerful and potent tying-in of organisations to the ethos and objectives of the NHS. We must be very careful not to regard the licensing process as something within which to impose too many conditions, but as a basic framework that ties the licensees into the system. That is particularly important when organisations start to go wrong. We will discuss later how they are rescued from those predicaments. However, it seems to me that this creates a basic level playing field, and that it would be a mistake to use that process to do much more than tie everyone into the basic system. It sort of replaces the old authorisation process on compliance and quality that was operated by old Monitor, but it is a way of going forward as new organisations come into the NHS as providers of NHS services. I just wanted to add those comments because I think that these amendments might be adding a bit too much to the responsibilities of the licensee.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, licence conditions will be the mechanism through which Monitor will be able to prevent potentially anti-competitive behaviour and enable service integration, where this is what commissioners want. Monitor would also use licence conditions to collect the information it would need to set prices, and to help identify at an early stage—at an early stage—if a provider was at risk of financial distress. If that was the case, it could work with the provider to address potential problems, as well as supporting commissioners to ensure continuity of services. I completely understand the concerns in that area.
First, I think that I need to make clear that all providers of NHS healthcare services will be subject to the requirement to hold a licence. This includes providers of primary medical services, which is the question posed in Amendment 279A. Furthermore, where a provider is providing services that carry a requirement to be registered with the Care Quality Commission, that registration will be a prerequisite to being granted a licence by Monitor. We all want to see close operational links between Monitor and the CQC. The Bill emphasises this by placing duties of co-operation on both organisations, not just in matters such as information sharing, but also in the development of the joint application mechanism for providers seeking registration from both bodies.
We are also clear that regulation must be proportionate, and impose the minimum of additional burdens on those being regulated, while still safeguarding the interests of patients and the public. To that end, the Bill makes provision for the Secretary of State to make regulations establishing an exemptions regime, so that licensing can be targeted towards those parts of the health service where there is the greatest need for regulation. While we are clear that there must be an exemptions regime, we also recognise the importance of making sure that we get the scope of it right. To that end, we are already committed to consulting fully next year on our proposals for the exemptions regulations. Noble Lords may also be aware that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee of your Lordships’ House has recommended that the first set of exemption regulations should be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. We agree, and both Houses will have the opportunity to debate them before they come into force.
The Bill provides for Monitor to attach conditions to licences. While the Bill sets a framework for the scope of those conditions in Clauses 95 to 97, we are clear that it will be for Monitor itself to develop the detail as the sector regulator. The intention is that the conditions will support Monitor in exercising its functions and that Monitor will be best placed to know how they should be framed to achieve that. Therefore, including large numbers of mandatory conditions on the face of the Bill, as some noble Lords have suggested in certain amendments—for example, Amendments 283, 285ZA and 287A—would undermine the Monitor’s independence, which we do not think is desirable if it is to be a robust and vigorous sector regulator.
Nevertheless, I would like to reassure the Committee that there will be proper oversight of Monitor’s proposals for conditions. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State will have the power to veto the first set of licence conditions. We are clear that Monitor must be able to operate freely and autonomously within the legislative framework established by the Bill. We have built in reasonable checks and balances through requirements for key products, such as the licensing criteria and conditions, to be subject to approval by the Secretary of State. Although I understand entirely the reasoning behind amendments tabled by noble Lords which would increase the level of the Secretary of State’s involvement in provider regulation—for example, Amendments 281A, 282A and 282B—regrettably, I feel that these go a step too far in limiting Monitor’s independence.
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked me quite a number of questions to which I feel I should write in response. In particular, however, she asked whether Monitor will have the role of resolving disputes and whether all disputes would go to court. The answer to both of those questions is no. The NHS standard contract already provides for contractual disputes to be resolved through arbitration and this will not change. Licence holders have to agree special conditions or modifications to conditions. If the provider disagrees and Monitor then wants to proceed, it must refer the matter to the Competition Commission for consideration.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones spoke to Amendment 281A. I want just to comment briefly on that. The amendment would increase the minimum length of notice period during which representations could be made following publication of a notice of proposed exemptions. I am grateful to my noble friend for that. The Bill is clear that the notice period should be not less than 28 days. It could therefore be much more than that, and our expectation in most cases is that it will be. But there will be times when the Secretary of State needs to act quickly, so being locked into a notice period of not less than 90 days could be detrimental to a particular provider or group of providers.
My noble friend Lady Williams spoke to two amendments, Amendments 287EA and 287EB, where the purpose is to ensure that licence conditions on providers of NHS services restrict the income they can earn from private patients and the number of private patients they treat, as well as that funds provided for NHS care are not used to subsidise private treatment offered by foundation trusts, with various conditions attached. I understand my noble friend’s concern about this. However, the amendments would be impractical, and in particular for licence holders who are not NHS bodies they would be highly undesirable. Foundation trusts’ principal purpose—we will come to this in a later group of amendments, when we discuss the private patient income cap—is to provide goods and services for the NHS in England. It means that they must earn most of their income, over 50 per cent, from NHS services. We are tabling a government amendment to make it clear that the majority of every foundation trust’s income will continue to be from NHS service provision. Foundation trusts must comply with their principal purpose or they will be breaking the law. They could be at risk of successful legal challenge if they fail to meet their principal purpose. We are tabling a second government amendment to require foundation trusts to show in their annual reports how income earned from private activities has impacted on the provision of NHS services. Using NHS income to subsidise private patient work would lead to foundation trusts breaching the NHS constitution. The Government also gave a commitment that foundation trusts will have to produce separate accounts for their NHS and private-funded work.
Finally, I want to mention briefly the amendments that will fall to me to move in relation to licensing: Amendments 280A, 281B, 284A to 284C, 285A, 286B, 287C and 287D, and 288A to 288F. These are without exception minor tidying-up amendments to improve the drafting or clarify meaning, and I hope that the Committee will accept them when they are moved. I hope, too, that the Committee feels reassured by my explanation of how we envisage licensing to operate and that the noble Baroness will be able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, can the Minister provide clarification on the questions I asked? First, who is going to define what is expected of primary care services in terms of how they are integrated? If that does not form part of their licensing, who will define the minimum standard across the country? Secondly, in Amendment 282ZC I set out that:
“A criterion for a person or organisation to be granted a licence must be that that person or organisation demonstrates a commitment to education, training and research”.
I would be grateful if the Minister could explain the situation when someone may well be good enough to provide clinical services but shows absolutely no commitment to any aspect of education and training, even for the development of their own staff, or to any of the research developments that might be happening in their field. I would include in this physiotherapy and occupational therapy assistance, such as people putting appliances into homes and those providing supportive care-assistance services in health, but not the secondary and tertiary-care specialised services which are covered very adequately by all the criteria from the royal colleges. It is about the minimum standard.
My third question relates to indemnity: do the Government feel that it is acceptable for a provider to be licensed without having to demonstrate that it has adequate indemnity?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness if I skirted over the considerable number of questions she asked, and if it would be helpful to her I will write her a letter on all of them. Perhaps I may cover two at this point. As regards her Amendment 282ZC, our expectation is that Monitor’s licensing criteria will be light-touch and broadly drawn, to encompass a wide range of providers. The amendment she has tabled does not lend itself to that approach. Much as I understand the importance of this particular issue, requiring any and every licence applicant to meet a definition of,
“commitment to education, training and research”,
that Monitor has developed does not fit with the principles of proportionate and targeted regulation. But I will write to her with further reasoning on that.
As regards the noble Baroness’s Amendment 282ZB, which is about indemnity, if she will forgive me, again I think that I will have to write to her.
Lord Clement-Jones
I have another amendment on which the Minister might find a lacuna—Amendment 287A, which deals with the Nolan principles.
Baroness Thornton
I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, asked that, because I was waiting to hear what the answer would be. I look forward to the noble Earl’s response. I fear that the noble Earl will be spending the whole of the weekend writing letters to all of us about these matters.
I am not going to say very much about this. This has been a divided debate, but many of the questions asked have been similar. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was quite right to raise the issue of requirements. She and her noble friend Lord Clement-Jones were right to raise the issue of transparency, which is very important here.
I am not sure that we on these Benches would agree that the checks and balances are the right ones. At this stage, we will wait for the letters from the noble Earl. I will also read his remarks again in Hansard. We may return to discuss this matter again. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Thornton
“( ) The chair and the chief executive must be separate roles, and cannot be held by the same person.”
Baroness Thornton
We turn now to the very important matter of Monitor and accountability. I see that many noble Lords have amendments in this group, many of them echoing each other. The reason for that is that, given the powerful role that Monitor is to have—whether it will have this role under the regime proposed by the Minister or the alternative architecture proposed by myself earlier today—we think that accountability is very important indeed.
We propose two improvements to Monitor’s governance. We believe that its functions should be exercised in the public interest and therefore that it should meet in public, as the NHS Commissioning Board will. We should also no longer have a combined chair and chief executive post. I hardly need say to the House that this arrangement is totally against established good practice in the public or private sector. I rest that issue there and look forward to the noble Earl’s response.
When foundation trusts were set up, the idea was that they could earn freedoms from traditional NHS management and also bring an element of democratic accountability and community ownership. It must be said that much of this has not materialised. Some foundation trusts up north have made an effort to engage locally with the people they serve. Some have adopted a business model rather than a community ownership model. I am sure that all noble Lords are members of their foundation trusts—I hope that they are and that they take part when asked to do so. The target to push up membership numbers in the trusts seems to have been forgotten.
Being successful in becoming a foundation trust shows that a fairly high barrier was overcome but that represents only the position at one point in time. As with the share market, things can go up or down. Some big-name foundation trusts have had their bad patches. A few, surprising names have been at the edge of intervention. If you compare the list of foundation trusts flagged as being in difficulty by Monitor with the list of ratings from Dr Foster or, in its time, the ratings from the Healthcare Commission, there seems to be no pattern at all. Indeed, a double-excellent foundation trust came close to de-authorisation.
Every large, complex organisation can get into trouble. Past success is no guarantee of future performance nor is it necessarily even a good predictor. That is why we argue that the oversight of foundation trusts by Monitor should continue and its intervention powers should remain. We have long argued for shifting the balance of power and we fully support the idea of earned autonomy with the regulator as an independent judge. But if it is earned it can also be taken back. We shall see what transpires when one foundation trust is obviously unable to present a viable business plan. What will happen to its future?
Monitor has to continue in the role we gave it as the authoriser of foundation trusts as they earn their limited independence. In recent times, it toned down the role it took as the promoter of foundation trusts and as a trade body as a step too far. We argue that Monitor as a regulator should be neutral not a cheerleader. We can accept the principle that it is wrong to favour any type of organisation for arbitrary or political reasons, as is set out in the operating framework. We do not accept the convoluted and ultimately meaningless formulation contained in the Bill. Monitor should retain its intervention powers. We accept the case for autonomy and community ownership but in the final analysis we see foundation trusts as still part of the NHS and so, in the end, subject to the powers of the Secretary of State.
We accept that the governors should be a strong element in foundation trust governance but, as the Bill accepts, they need support and development in that role. Most foundation trusts will say that governor effectiveness takes at least five years but governors, no matter how effective under normal circumstances, may be completely ineffective in times of overwhelming crisis. It is then that the Secretary of State must have the power to intervene to ensure the overall functioning of the NHS and to protect the interests of patients and their communities. A major change here is that the Bill extends the concept of financial regulation to non-foundation trust providers—that is, the private sector. As I have said before, we can see the logic in that.
I am going to skip ahead and do what I said earlier in the Bill: you do every other page of your brief and see whether anybody notices. We have already had a lot of debates about these issues.
Finally, we come to reservations about the interaction between the licensing regime and the use of standard contracts. Actually, we have also discussed that so I will not ask those questions again. We have recently seen missives from the Department of Health and from Monitor exploring the ideas around regulation. It is slightly amazing that these are all coming out now, as helpful as they may be. The general idea, as we have said before about the Bill, is that you should consult on the legislation, allow Parliament its scrutiny role and then implement it. However, as we know, the Bill exhibits the principle of reverse engineering. When its progress was paused to allow consultation, the Government continued to roll out the implementation and the Bill is catching up with that now. We scrutinise the Bill alongside its implementation and the secondary legislation is written up in the form of documents coming out of the Department of Health.
I turn to our amendments in this group. Amendment 260EC provides that the chair and chief executive of Monitor cannot be the same person, Amendment 260GA provides that Monitor must meet in public and Amendment 267D would apply the mandate to Monitor. We think that Amendment 267D might be improved on and might even be better located in Clause 20 on the mandate itself, but the point of it is to raise the idea that the Secretary of State may be given a greater power of direction of Monitor and ultimately boost its accountability. I beg to move.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I would like to continue the train of thought started by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about the specifics relating to Monitor. I shall speak to Amendments 260F, 260G, 260H, 269A, 294BA, 294BB and 294BC.
First, I may not have got Amendments 260F and 260G, relating to the first chief executive of Monitor, completely right, because Monitor is already in existence, but in principle the chief executive of Monitor should surely be appointed by the Secretary of State in the same way in which the chairman and chief executive of the national Commissioning Board are. As we go through this debate, it will become increasingly obvious that Monitor’s role is as important as that of the NHS Commissioning Board, so I would have thought that having an appointments system on all fours with the board would be imperative. Then again, we come to the question of the provision of information to the Secretary of State. Amendment 260H mirrors the powers possessed by the Secretary of State in relation to the NHS Commissioning Board. It seems sensible that that should be in place as well.
Harking back to our debate on competition and the application of EU competition law, we come on to a rather different issue. This is an interesting place for these amendments to be put. In Clause 118 it is the Competition Commission that deals with the determination of methods of setting prices under the national tariff if there is a disagreement—the Competition Commission has that referred to it by Monitor. For all the reasons that we explored in the debate on the first set of amendments today, it is inappropriate, in my view and in the view of many others, for the Competition Commission to be so heavily involved in matters relating to the NHS. Substituting the Secretary of State for the commission seems to be sensible.
The objection is sometimes raised that we need an independent body in order to set the method. That is a fair point but it is an objection to the Secretary of State doing this entirely on his own, whereas an independent panel appointed by the Secretary of State could do the job equally well. That would ensure that there was some arm’s-length relationship with the Secretary of State in these circumstances. It is quite unnecessary for the Competition Commission to do what is going to be an extremely unfamiliar job for it in assessing the methodology of setting the national tariff—far better that others who will become familiar with it should undertake that task as advisers, consultants or whatever to the Secretary of State. All these amendments make good sense.
Lord Warner
I thought there was going to be an intervention from my left. I was not going to intervene in the debate on this group. I am sorry if I missed something by missing the debate on the first group of amendments. I have some concerns about the dual role of Monitor as the arbiter of foundation trust status and the raft of new duties that it will undertake as an economic regulator. Let me make it clear that I have no problem whatever with the role of Monitor as the economic regulator and the functions that go with that. However, I want to share with the Minister and the House some of the previous Government’s thinking on whether Monitor could combine being the economic regulator and the arbiter on the passage to foundation trust status. The situation, if anything, is more difficult now. We finally concluded that we could not make Monitor the economic regulator until we were much, much further along the path of completing the job of trusts becoming foundation trusts because there were potential conflicts of interests, which we will come to later.
I raise this issue at this point because there are accountability issues here as well. I can see the very strong arguments—and I have every sympathy with the Government on this—for setting up an economic regulator and the Secretary of State not dipping in and out of those functions. If you are going to have a regulator, let it be independent and leave it to get on with the job. I am very comfortable with that. My concern is that we are already going to be loading a very large number of functions on to this economic regulator, and to expect it to carry on, even with Chinese walls, as the arbiter on foundation trust status is a big ask, given that most of the promising candidates for foundation trust status have already jumped over the bar and we are getting down to the ones that have been finding it rather difficult to jump over the bar. That could be because the Government have set themselves the target of 2016. We set ourselves targets of 2008 and 2012, and quite a lot of trusts have still got nowhere near jumping over the bar, so I certainly would not bet the farm on them all having cleared the hurdles by 2016.
Monitor, in its role as the arbiter on foundation trusts, needs to keep a very close eye on those that have cleared the bar and to intervene when it needs to. The Secretary of State is actually embroiled in that process. The cases have to be cleared by the Department of Health and the Secretary of State before they go on to Monitor. That is a long-established process. The Secretary of State is going to become involved to some extent if trusts lose their foundation trust status; they go back into the pool in a sense.
We are now dealing with a situation that is much more difficult financially and much more challenging than it was under the previous Government. We are trying to get Monitor to do an even more difficult job with the most difficult trusts in an extremely difficult climate and to take on the job of being an economic regulator. There are real issues about whether that can be done and about separating out the areas where the Secretary of State has a legitimate role. It is legitimate for the Secretary of State to have a presence in the build-up to a foundation trust application and when a trust loses that status. However, that set of issues is separate from the accountability issue when Monitor performs the role of an economic regulator. Will the Minister share with us some thinking about how those separate functions will be handled in the real world that we will face over the next three to five years?
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, I wish to address my Amendments 274AA, 274C, 274D and 274E in this group. I shall speak as briefly as I can. I share many of the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, on whether we are overloading Monitor with too many requirements to make judgments, to intervene and to be responsible to enable any single body to function, however brilliantly led it might be.
This amendment is about the conflict of goals on the part of Monitor. I believe that it is a very important amendment, although it looks modest enough. The Bill states that if Monitor has a conflict of objectives—or, more clearly, a conflict of duties—that will in essence be resolved by the head of Monitor making a statement about the nature of that conflict and the ways in which it could be resolved and then turning it back to the perpetrators to solve the problem as best they can. Those conflicts are substantial. We should make it clear that they are fundamental to the whole argument that we have been having, including in the brilliant previous debate because, first and foremost, the general and primary objective of Monitor is supposed to be the promotion of patient health and patient care. That is fundamental. We heard in the very eloquent speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, how she thinks Monitor has changed its philosophy of life within the NHS and has become much more concerned with patient care and patient protection than with the pursuit of competition primarily for its own sake. That is a very important step forward in our understanding of the Bill.
However, it still leaves open the possibility of a conflict arising between the duties of Monitor. I have just mentioned the first of those duties—the care and concern about patients who are dependent on the health service. The second duty continues to be a concern with anti-competitive policy, and the third is concerned with integration and collaboration, about which there has been a great deal of discussion and many amendments in this House. The Bill gives us very little guidance on any conflict over which of those duties should be given priority over the others. It says that a conflict of duties or a conflict between responsibilities is to be resolved in this rather heavy-handed way of a statement being made about the nature of the conflict and how it might be resolved, which is then distributed to all those concerned. However, there is no resolution of the conflict. It remains part of what one might describe as an ongoing negotiation that some day might resolve itself in one direction or another. It has interesting parallels with yesterday’s events. However, Amendment 274E sets out very clearly that we believe that ultimately conflict should be resolved by the Secretary of State. We accept all the intervening proposals in the Bill at present—that statements should be made, that the conflict should be defined, and that it should then be passed on to those involved to try to find a solution. If, at the end of the day, no solution is found, it is absolutely crucial, in our view, that this becomes the responsibility of the Secretary of State as the ultimate goal of any accountability or responsibility within the service itself.
In this House I think we have got much closer to recognising how significant this final duty over a range of issues is. The Secretary of State is open to accountability to Parliament and to the general public, the people of England, so we say in Amendment 274E that if no solution can be found, there should ultimately be a reference back to the Secretary of State, who then has to make this ultimate decision. We have deliberately framed it to say that he is the ultimate decider, not one of those deciders on the way, although Monitor certainly has a role in resolving the conflict.
Since the future health service will in part be defined by what is seen to be the most significant of those duties, I think the Minister and most of us in this House believe that that central duty has to be responsibility to the patient and to the care and protection of the patient. I urge us to give this very serious consideration, because it is part of the pyramid that was set out in the brilliant speeches in an earlier debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, and by my noble friend Lord Newton of Braintree, who has now had to leave us. I therefore propose the amendment in that spirit. It puts into a microcosm the concept of where the most responsible and urgent duties on Monitor lie.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I think that this has been a very useful debate. The Bill provides a more autonomous NHS, and it does so in order to deliver high-quality services and value for money. Monitor, as sector regulator, would establish clear standards and rules to protect patients’ interests in the provision of NHS services. Monitor would be required to lay its annual report and accounts before Parliament and have the accounts audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General. It would also need to comply with other rules and guidance that cover central government public bodies, including the seven general principles of public life, the Treasury’s guidance document, Managing Public Money, and rules on corporate governance. Monitor would also have to respond in writing to parliamentary committees and any advice from HealthWatch England. The Secretary of State would oversee Monitor’s performance of its functions to ensure that those functions were performed well. The Secretary of State would not have control over Monitor’s day-to-day decisions, but would hold Monitor to account for discharging its duties. That point is extremely relevant in the context of a number of amendments in this group. The Secretary of State would appoint the chair of Monitor and other non-executive directors and would have to give consent to the appointment of the chief executive. I hope that point answers Amendments 260F and 260G.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I will come on to that in a moment. The Secretary of State would also have specific powers of veto; for example, over the first set of licence conditions and, in individual cases, of provider unsustainability, where he considered that Monitor was failing in its functions to support commissioners in securing continuity of services. In addition, he would be able to request information from Monitor regarding the exercise of its functions as and when he considered it necessary. I hope that this therefore allays the concerns of noble Lords who put their names to Amendment 260H.
However, Monitor needs to be free from day-to-day political and other inappropriate interference in order for it to be able to act in the best interests of patients. In order to maintain the integrity of its relationship with the Secretary of State, Monitor must be able to take independent decisions on the exercise of its functions, such as calculating prices, setting and enforcing licence conditions and resolving conflicts of interests. Making such decisions subject to approval would be inconsistent with this approach, and would conflate responsibilities. In particular, it would undermine the Secretary of State’s ability to hold Monitor to account. There would also be significant risk of decisions being politicised inappropriately. By contrast, independence in such decisions would increase transparency and help ensure that providers were treated fairly.
I understand the motives of noble Lords who added their names to Amendments 274AA, 274C, 274D and 247E, relating to the Secretary of State’s involvement in resolving conflicts of interest. The Government agree that where they occur, conflicts must be resolved, but giving the Secretary of State a role in decision-making would undermine his ability to hold Monitor to account. The Secretary of State would be obliged to keep under review Monitor’s performance in discharging its duties. He would be able to direct Monitor, where it had failed or was at risk of failing significantly, to carry out its functions. In extremis, he could arrange for a third party to perform those functions or perform functions himself. I hope that those points answer the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.
The Bill also ensures transparency and fairness, through requirements on Monitor to consult widely when discharging functions and appeal mechanisms for the major decisions it makes. Here, I am addressing Amendments 294BA, 294BB, 294BC. In this way, our proposals strike a balance between maintaining sufficient independence and ensuring that the Secretary of State has sufficient ability to hold Monitor to account for the performance of its functions. I believe there is consensus that we need to ensure that this balance is correct.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones asked why it should be the Competition Commission that decides on challenges to Monitor’s proposals on licence modifications, pricing methodologies or whatever. I am grateful to him for that question. It is fundamental to our proposals that Monitor would be an independent regulator and that the appropriate role for the Secretary of State is to oversee Monitor’s performance against its duties, and to intervene where he considered that Monitor was significantly failing in any of its functions. However, it is vital that the legislation provides appropriate checks and balances on Monitor without undermining its day-to-day independence from political control. That is why we proposed that Monitor must consult on the licence conditions that it proposes to impose on providers and on its draft methodology for pricing. Providers and, in the case of pricing, providers and commissioners should be able to object to Monitor’s proposals, and where a sufficient percentage objected, there should be a mechanism for independent and impartial adjudication. That is the role we propose for the Competition Commission. It would act as adjudicator on disputed licence modifications and on disputes over the pricing methodology. The basis for this adjudication would be Monitor’s overarching duty to protect and promote patients’ interests.
Baroness Thornton
Did the Government consider any bodies other than the Competition Commission as being appropriate to fulfil this role? If so, which were they and why were they not thought to be appropriate? This is a rather heavy-duty form of monitoring Monitor.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
I am puzzled by why the Government do not see the Competition Commission’s overseeing of this area of Monitor’s responsibilities as not being neutral. Would not a body such as the Office of Fair Trading be more appropriate? It has a reputation not only of being more neutral but of having shown in the past particular sensitivity and understanding of health as a service provided to the people of England.
Earl Howe
I think it is a question of specialist expertise. I do not regard it as heavy-handed to have the Competition Commission acting in this role—which, we hope, would not be a role that it would need to perform with any regularity. It is an established body. It would apply a public interest test rather than a competition test, which is important. One has to question whether the Office of Fair Trading is the right body. I will of course reflect on my noble friend's suggestion, but we believe that the Competition Commission is a good fit in this sense. If the Secretary of State were to play the role of adjudicator, that would be very detrimental. The result would effectively be the politicisation of Monitor's decisions. As I said earlier, that in itself would undermine the Secretary of State's role in holding Monitor to account for the outcomes that it achieves.
The noble Lord, Lord Warner, referred to conflicts in the role of Monitor in overseeing foundation trusts. We are quite open about the fact that there is a risk of conflict of interest here. That is why it is essential that the Bill sets out a robust way for conflicts to be resolved. In a later debate, we can discuss that at greater length. I listened with interest to the speech of my noble friend Lady Williams, and I will of course reflect further on everything she said, as I always do. I think I have covered the main issues raised by the amendments in this group.
Baroness Thornton
I think that almost the first sentence I uttered in this debate was: will Monitor meet in public; and what do the Government intend to do about joint chairmanship and chief executiveship? If the Minister answered those questions, I did not hear him and I apologise.
Lord Clement-Jones
The Minister said that he thought that the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Williams—Amendment 274AB, et cetera—would undermine the role of the Secretary of State and his ability to call Monitor to account. That seems a very far-fetched way to describe an attitude to conflict-resolution. The Secretary of State, particularly under Amendment 274E, is asked to resolve conflict. This is an addition. There is no other way, as far as I can see, of resolving conflict. A key issue, which has also been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in this debate, has been the multiplicity of roles of Monitor. Therefore, there is a strong need to resolve such conflicts.
I ask the Minister to consider further whether that is really detracting from the Secretary of State's ability to monitor Monitor—in the words of the noble Baroness. We need a mechanism to resolve conflict. Faute de mieux, this seems to be the best one.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says, but the fact is that the amendments he refers to would reduce Monitor’s independence from political interference. We are clear that we do not want political interference in Monitor’s activities. The intent of the amendment is clearly to give the Secretary of State increased accountability for the decisions around Monitor's functions. We believe that Monitor will be an effective regulator and able to deal with conflicts of interest. Clause 63 requires Monitor to resolve conflicts between its functions. If a failure to resolve conflicts between functions was significant, then the Secretary of State already has the power to intervene under Clause 67. Therefore, there is an intervention mechanism but we suggest that it should be triggered only in the circumstances to which I have referred.
Lord Walton of Detchant
Will the Minister say whether, if Monitor is to meet in public, it will have reserve powers to allow it to go in camera if for any reason it may be required to consider highly sensitive personal information, which ought to preserve confidentiality in respect to the individuals concerned? It is crucial that such a power should be available to it.
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I think this has been an extremely useful debate. I can see why this Government may not trust their Secretary of State to hold Monitor to account. However, I am concerned about the idea that because we—and I do not just mean Members on this side of the House—are anxious that accountability rests in the right place in the Bill, that must therefore translate into political influence or micromanaging. I do not think that is at all the case here. Therefore, we do have an issue still to explore regarding the accountability of Monitor.
I also think we need to explore whether the Competition Commission is the right place for a public interest test to rest. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, may have made a useful suggestion about which other bodies could possibly undertake that function. Again, we find that this quango is determining its own rules and then implementing them. That is not a satisfactory situation. However, I did take hope from the fact the Minister said yes to the question of whether the chair and chief executive of Monitor would not continue to be the same person, and that Monitor should meet in public. Is the Minister accepting Amendments 260EC and 260GA, or is that the statement of principle with a government amendment coming forward at a later stage or, indeed, a letter from the Minister, clarifying the issue? Otherwise, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Warner
Lord Warner
My Lords, this amendment is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I begin by briefly making clear my position on competition, which underpins this amendment. I am sorry that I had to miss the discussion on the first group of amendments. However, my position on competition is no different from what it was when I was the NHS reform Minister in the Blair Government, but it is somewhat different from that of the current Front Bench, as will become clear.
I start from a position of being opposed to monopolies, whether they are in the public or private sectors, and I consider that such research evidence as is available—such as that by Dr Zack Cooper at the LSE—supports the view that competition—
Baroness Murphy
I apologise. I think that the group we should be addressing begins with an amendment in my name. Unfortunately, I withdrew that amendment last week but it has continued to appear in the Marshalled List, for which I apologise. I believe that we should be moving on to the next amendment in that group.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Ullswater)
Perhaps I may clarify matters for the Committee. The group that we are now discussing begins with Amendment 265ZA, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, but which she did not move. However, the amendments in the group following that one were called in their place.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, we seem to have skipped a whole group, but for what purpose? I was planning to move Amendment 267ZF. Has there been some discussion between the usual channels?
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
We are on the group beginning with Amendment 265ZA, which was not moved. The next two amendments in the group were also not moved. I then called Amendment 266, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, which he is now addressing.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I think that that is inadvertent. We seem to have missed a whole group of amendments.
Baroness Thornton
Perhaps I may help. I think that the thing to do is to deal with this group of amendments and the noble Lord can then move his amendment. We will then take the group of amendments that we should have been taking out of turn. Am I right in that? I think that that is the best thing to do.
Lord Warner
Is the Committee happy for me to continue? I consider that research evidence as is available, such as that carried out by Dr Zack Cooper at the LSE, shows the benefits of competition and supports the view that competition, when used sensibly, improves services for patients and can indeed save lives. It is perfectly possible to support both competition and integration; they are not mutually incompatible. I shall not pursue the evidence base for my views today. However, I should like to clarify briefly the circumstances in which we should be supporting the use of competition in the NHS in the best interests of patients and why it is important to tackle barriers to entry to the NHS market. It is important to recognise that we already have an NHS market in which many NHS providers do indeed compete for patients against other NHS providers. The Bill does not suddenly inject competition into the NHS but merely tries to impose some better rules and a system for regulating that competition.
There are basically three sets of circumstances in which competition could—not should—be used. The first is that, as a matter of principle, all NHS providers should be subject to market testing periodically. The second is when there is clear provider failure and it seems sensible to test the market to establish the best set of arrangements for replacing the failed incumbent. The third is where there is a set of circumstances when the NHS itself—the commissioners in practice—wish to change significantly the way in which services are provided and it is not apparent that the current incumbents can adjust quickly to the patient’s needs. The first set of circumstances has often caused a great deal of angst in the discussion of competition. I certainly do not start from that position. I believe that it is the second and third areas that I have described where we need to examine whether there are real barriers to entry by new providers, irrespective of whether those providers come from elsewhere in the NHS—from the private sector, social enterprise or the voluntary organisations.
Amendment 266 is concerned to establish much more clearly than now what the barriers to NHS market entry are. We know from the work of the collaboration and competition panel that primary care trusts have behaved in anti-competitive ways and have frustrated the best interests of patients. We know from the experience of the East Surrey nurses when they tried to set up a social enterprise how frustrated they were at changing themselves from NHS employees into a social enterprise so that they could compete for NHS business. We know that across the voluntary sector, voluntary organisations have been frustrated over their attempts to compete for NHS services over a long period of time. We also know that many private providers of services find the tendering processes for providing NHS services prolonged and excessively expensive and that they are too often frustrated by shifting political opinions about the desirability of competition.
I could go on with examples of the way in which the NHS has effectively shut the door to new entrants. Some of the most recent examples are the ways in which many primary care trusts divested themselves of their provider services without any proper system of market testing when it was clear that many of those services were extremely inefficient. We need to take the NHS out of its comfort zone in a future where it faces a huge set of demographic and financial challenges. Keeping it in the NHS family is no longer acceptable or in the public interest. We need an independent, authoritative and robust analysis of the barriers to entry to the NHS market so that we can consider what action should be taken to remove those barriers. Amendment 266 proposes that Monitor does this within a year of Royal Assent. I believe that Monitor would welcome being given this assignment but I would be more than willing to consider alternatives if the Government thought, for example, that the Office of Fair Trading was a more appropriate organisation to do the job. It is important that we get this job done as speedily as possible. I also support Amendments 278 and 287 to which the noble Lord, Lord Patel, will be speaking and to which I have added my name.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, I am very grateful that Amendment 265C has somehow managed to escape from the tsunami of amendments so that I can bring it to the Committee’s attention very briefly. It is again an amendment that seeks to make sure that when competition is allowed or encouraged—the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has spoken on these lines himself—it should be because it clearly improves the quality of health and the quality of provision within society as a whole. The purpose of Amendment 265C is to make it clear that competition is welcome when it improves the quality of the service; it narrows inequalities; it ensures, in particular, that there should be a better outcome as a result of that competition; and it is, therefore, a relatively qualifying condition to permitting competition to flourish.
We have heard a number of very well informed speeches in the House, not least from the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, to the effect that in some situations competition can clearly encourage innovation, can improve new approaches and can help in providing the NHS a way forward to deal with the huge problems that we all recognise exist. However, in large part we are also very worried about the idea of competition as the ruling principle of the health services in this country, and we heard a very moving set of evidence from the noble Lord, Lord Owen, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about the devastation that unrestrained competition can exercise on a health service.
However, having spent 10 years of my life in the United States, I absolutely corroborate that. I know far too many people, one or two of whom are National Health Service refugees to this country, of outstanding talent, who are not in a category where they can afford the huge prices that are charged for complex and chronic conditions in the United States. How do we achieve this difficult balance so as to have competition that improves the quality of the health service but does not bring about the devastation of a great many human beings because they simply cannot afford the cost of complex operations or looking after the chronically ill? The situation of the chronically ill in the United States is pathetic in very many cases.
Therefore, this amendment and several others in this group would enable us to walk this delicate line in a way that permits competition, but competition that is in the interests of the patients of the health service and not competition that could devastate the health service itself.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 287B. In his speech at the outset of today’s debate, the Minister said that there were four areas where he was considering amendments to Part 3, which deals with Monitor. If memory serves, he said there were areas where the Bill had not been completely amended to conform to the Future Forum report. This is a particular example of that.
Clause 96, the supplementary conditions, says it is possible for Monitor to include conditions that require,
“the licence holder to do, or not to do, specified things or things of a specified description … within such period as may be specified in order to prevent anti-competitive behaviour in the provision of health care services for the purposes of the NHS”.
Of course, that mirrors the duties of Monitor as set out in Clause 59, which says:
“Monitor must exercise its functions with a view to preventing anti-competitive behaviour”—
so far, so good. However, Monitor also has a duty to,
“exercise its functions with a view to enabling health care services provided for the purposes of the NHS to be provided in an integrated way where it considers that this would”
improve quality and so on. There is no mirror of that particular duty in the supplementary conditions in Clause 96, which is why this amendment adds the following wording:
“or for the purposes of encouraging the integration of services in the interest of people who use such services”.
A number of other examples are the subjects of amendments as well and will no doubt come up in the course of the Bill. It seems to me that the equal and opposite to the anti-competitive duty of Monitor, which is enshrined in the ability to set conditions and so on, is not mirrored in the integration of services, and this is an extremely good example of that. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to indicate that it is simply an oversight and it should be included in the Bill.
Baroness Murphy
My Lords, I wanted to come in on this matter of anti-competitive practices and the role of Monitor in it. I apologise to the Committee if some of these matters have already been covered, but I was unable to be here this morning. However, this seems like an opportunity to speak, as we are discussing Monitor’s role in anti-competitive practice.
I am concerned that we have not yet talked about the quite serious anti-competitive practice that exists in the NHS today, and how damaging it is. As we know, the independent co-operation and competition panel has highlighted a range of tactics that are very common at the moment in the NHS and which go seriously against patients’ interests. We have not sufficiently considered these when we are looking at competition. We tend to think of competition in relation to the independent sector versus the NHS in approaching the provision of services, but in fact it is this anti-competitive practice within the NHS which is so damaging. An example of this is the protection of certain local services against providers for elective operations, and so on.
I can think of an example in my own backyard, at Barts and The London—and this is a very real case. For years and years Barts used the mainstream orthopaedic services to provide local podiatry services, at a very high cost and very anti-competitively against the local community services, which had very skilled podiatrists who were able to do foot operations very cheaply and simply with a much smaller waiting list. Those sorts of anti-competitive practices are rife throughout the NHS, and are against patients’ best interests. It is utterly crucial that this role to reduce as much anti-competitive practice as possible should be watched by Monitor, but we want it to be co-ordinated with its role on integration—there is absolutely no reason why the two things cannot go side by side.
I am sure that we will come on to mergers and acquisitions, but the recent protection of patients and the public—for example, against the merger of two mental health trusts, Norfolk and Waveney, and Suffolk—seems to me to be extremely good judgment about what is likely to be in patients’ best interests. We should remember these matters of anti-competitive practice that are, as I say, rife in the NHS, and we really need to do quite a lot to stamp them out. I hope that the role of Monitor in working on these practices in patients’ best interests will be strongly supported.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, was most helpful in setting out the criteria with which one would want to look at competition, and emphasising the importance of competition. But there is another area of competition, which is the one that really drives up quality of care: the inherent competitiveness of different clinicians and different clinical services, their desire to have better clinical outcomes than others, and the pressure that they will put on themselves within their own team to achieve better clinical outcomes.
I apologise to the House if I contributed in any way to the confusion over the numbering of the amendments as they have arisen. I would like to address the ones that come after Amendment 266, which will be Amendments 268B and 267C. Amendment 267C was tabled because of the large number of patients with complex clinical conditions.
It is very easy, when we are thinking about tariffs and services, to look almost at discrete nuggets of care, diagnosis and so on. Indeed, Monitor has a requirement in the Bill to seek appropriate advice to effectively discharge its functions in,
“the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of illness, or … the protection or improvement of public health”.
The amendment related to the management of a wide range of complex conditions has been tabled because in complex conditions many situations overlap and cannot be discretely targeted together, nor can they necessarily be unpacked one from another because of their impact on each other. That requires integration of clinical services.
Baroness Northover
The noble Baroness might be aware that Amendment 267C has leapfrogged from the group with Amendment 264 to the group after this. She may wish to address that amendment when we come to that group.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
I thank the noble Baroness. I am most grateful. That message had not reached me, although I may be a little deaf. I shall simply confine my remarks to the amendment in this group about Monitor reporting annually to the Secretary of State on how it discharges its duty to promote integration. I do not think that the comments that I made previously are annulled. They are relevant because, unless we have integrated services—however much they may be seen to be in competition with each other over different aspects—and attempt to have a seamless provision of care, at the end of the day it will be the patients who fall through the gaps.
Earlier today, we heard a lot about Monitor being light touch, not having a series of minimum criteria and being able to use its discretion in how it grants licences of all sorts. But I have a concern that there has to be a means by which the way in which Monitor functions is transparent and available to public scrutiny. That is why I have suggested that an annual report to the Secretary of State would allow such scrutiny to occur, particularly as regards promoting integration.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, in the first instance, I shall speak to Amendments 267ZDA and 269 in the names of my noble friend Lady Thornton and myself. Amendment 267ZDA refers to the need for integration. Indeed, there are a series of amendments on integration, with which I will try to deal as a group. Amendment 267ZDA gives an interpretation of integration which would,
“mean that health-related and social care services are provided in such a manner that individuals will experience services … as being independent of organisational barriers”—
which I suppose is the very definition of integration—and which offers patients,
“the most appropriate involvement in their care choices … which reduce … the need for separate assessments; and … which result in a care plan for the individual which covers all aspects of their care”.
Surely that aspiration would be shared by the Committee and widely within both the health and social care professions. It would seem to make sense to incorporate it in the Bill. However, Amendment 269 simply makes clear that it is unnecessary for a provision in the Bill to repeat a definition of anti-competitive behaviour since that already exists in existing legislation, although that is not a hugely important point.
In relation to other amendments in terms of integration, we certainly support Amendment 268B, which would provide the duty for Monitor to report annually as to how it has promoted integration. Amendment 274B seeks a requirement to publish a statement if conflicts between its functions arise which are likely to have a significant impact on integration of services. Amendments 278 and 278B impose requirements on the national Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups to extend the right of patients to make choices in respect of the integration of healthcare and to ensure the integration of services where that is in the public interest. Again, the aim is to drive the integration agenda. Then, as an overarching provision, Monitor would have under Amendment 278C the power to investigate whether the Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups are complying with those requirements. All of these seem to be perfectly sensible amendments to provide the right structure and one which Monitor could effectively supervise.
Still on the integration agenda, there are later amendments—Amendments 286A, 287 and 287B—which impact on integration. Amendment 286A allows a modification of Monitor’s powers to encourage integration, if that is in the interest of patients, as it usually will be, presumably. The amendments provide for modifications to licence conditions—again in the interest of integrated healthcare—to ensure that standing conditions of licences include requirements relating to or encouraging the integration of healthcare services. All that makes a sensible package to drive an important part of the underlying concept of the Bill and the too-long-deferred integration of services.
The other amendments in this group essentially relate to the issues of collaboration or competition. Here, it is slightly unfortunate that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay—I am sorry, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins—did not move Amendment 265ZA, which stresses that Monitor must exercise its functions with a view to promoting collaboration and preventing competitive behaviour. I think that is the other side of the coin that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, put on the table previously when she was complaining, perhaps rightly, about anti-competitive practices within the NHS. A more positive way of looking at that agenda is to say that NHS bodies should collaborate on the provision of services, rather than take a negative stance. That is, I suppose, a necessary fallback position, but the prime objective must be to ensure collaboration within and across health service provision and—having regard to what has just been indicated in relation to integration—with social services as well. That is probably the right approach.
Other amendments in this group relating to competition raise some other issues. For example, under Amendment 265C, there is a suggestion that Monitor’s duty to prevent anti-competitive behaviour should be qualified by requiring it to aim to improve the quality of services and outcomes and the efficacy of provision and reduce inequalities. These are listed separately; I take it that all of them—rather than any alternative—are intended to be part of Monitor’s duty. If the Minister were minded to accept the thrust of that argument, he would do so in that sense.
Again, there is the provision under Amendment 266, tabled by my noble friend Lord Warner, for Monitor to conduct and publish a review of anti-competitive barriers and their impacts within a year of Royal Assent. There may well be some sense in that, particularly in regard to the way in which he moved the amendment. There are similar duties on Monitor to look at impact assessments under Amendment 275. Government Amendment 278D, to be moved by the Minister later, refers to non-disclosure of the “business interests” of parties. Does that extend to the interests of, say, trusts or voluntary sector providers? Does “business” relate to their activities or would it be confined to commercial providers? It seems to me that it would be invidious if only one part of the provider sector had the protection of confidentiality; it should be applicable to all or none. There is of course no issue with the amendment that requires individual circumstances not to be subject to disclosure.
I have a question about Amendment 278J, which requires the Competition Commission to review the “occurrence” rather than the “development” of competition in the provision of healthcare services. It is not clear to me what the significance of the word “occurrence” is. This is not a government amendment and I do not know whether those who originally tabled it want to clarify the position. I understand the amendment if it requires the Competition Commission to review the impact of competition in the provision of healthcare services, but I do not know how the occurrence of competition would be reviewed. It does not actually make much sense to use the word in this context.
The thrust of most of these amendments makes sense and sets out a sensible role for Monitor. In what would have been the next group but for the leapfrogging, we will come on to look at the issue of conflicts, and I am sure that there will be some further discussion about that. However, I hope that the Minister will feel able broadly to support the amendments in this group and recognise that they should contribute to meeting the shared objectives that have emerged from today’s debate.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I apologise for not being here at the beginning of the consideration of this group because for once the Committee is making faster progress than I thought, but I have tabled two amendments that relate back to the issue of anti-competitive behaviour, so I will be following on from my remarks about the first of the amendments today. I seek greater clarity from the Minister. Given that Monitor has responsibility for preventing anti-competitive behaviour—in other words, not just the encouragement of competition but also the policing of it—what happens when someone complains to Monitor? In effect, Monitor has been given the same powers as the OFT and other economic regulators in other sectors and, as my noble friend Lord Beecham has just said, is subject to some oversight by the Competition Commission, which has duties in this respect.
Let me give two examples of what in other sectors would be seen as anti-competitive behaviour. One is where two providers in an area get together to divvy up what they know the commissioning body wants and provide a package that is acceptable to the commissioning group. A third provider would like to get in on the action. It is probably qualified, so that is not a hurdle. If that provider then complains to Monitor, is Monitor able to say, “This may appear to be a bit anti-competitive, but actually it is in the interests of patients”? I assume, from all the Minister has said and from what is set out in the document about the role of Monitor, that it means it can say that. But is that the end of the story? Can there be an appeal against Monitor to the courts or, if it is systematic, to the Competition Commission review role?
There is also the opposite scenario: competition laws relate to monopsony and oligopsony as well as to monopoly and oligopoly, so if a number of commissioning groups get together and decide that they will buy collectively from particular providing groups but not from others, is that also grounds for appeal to Monitor? If Monitor nevertheless decides that that is in the interests of patients, is there a further recourse? I was worried earlier today that there might be further recourse and that, despite all the assurances that have been given, Monitor is not actually the final regulator on what is in the patients’ interests, because it is supposed to act in accordance with or reflect the general rules, including EU rules, on competition and procurement.
This situation is going to arise because, with the Government’s encouragement, there will be more providers than those which get commissioned. A failed or disappointed provider must know how the system is supposed to work so that Monitor can look at it and be judged on it. With other economic regulators there is a form of appeal in this respect, to the Competition Commission. It is not used very frequently, but when we are trying to bed in a new system it may well be used more frequently by disappointed and failed competitors. If that is not to happen, it has to be clear in this Bill—and if not in this Bill then by ministerial decree and in regulations—that once Monitor decides something is in the interest of patients that is the end of the story. Otherwise, I cannot see the system working without constant appeals and second guessing.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, I shall be brief in speaking to these amendments. I wholly agree with the principle outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. There are many circumstances in which competition, properly controlled, will benefit the National Health Service and will benefit our community. But, like the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, I too, having worked in the United States, would be deeply concerned if competition were allowed to run riot. Years ago, I saw the affect of this. For instance, in the Massachusetts General Hospital, where I worked many years ago, the president of the hospital told me that they were required to debate and negotiate with no fewer than 47 different insurance companies in order to obtain coverage for the patients whom they treated.
Yet in the United States you still find, in certain communities, perfectly acceptable patterns of community care which are in many ways excellent, not least the Kaiser Permanente plan in California. I also visited an excellent clinic and associated hospital providing a substantial range of primary, secondary and tertiary care to a very wide community in Marshfield, Wisconsin. The Marshfield clinic serves a very large community in that state. All the people in the community pay an annual subscription in return for which they get a full range of primary, secondary and tertiary care of a very high standard. There are islands of excellence.
So far as competition in this country is concerned, I have always believed that the cap imposed upon foundation trusts in relation to private patients was unfair. It was imposed at a particular moment in time and based upon income derived by those individual trusts in a preceding period, and was grossly uneven. I have always favoured a partnership between the public and private sectors. In such hospitals and foundation trusts I believe there is a great advantage to allowing them to have more income from private patient beds: it not only generates income for the National Health Service, it also persuades many consultants to become geographically whole-time, looking after their public and private patients in the same hospital and not having to spend time, as many have in the past, travelling to private hospitals.
I believe in competition and in the public-private mix. But in pursuing that type of programme, it is absolutely crucial that Monitor has the authority to prevent any foundation trust from overstepping the mark and increasing its private provision to the extent that it will harm the services that it gives to NHS patients. I would love to have an assurance from the Minister that Monitor will be able to fulfil the function of controlling excesses which could damage the National Health Service if private provision went too far.
Lord Patel
My Lords, briefly, we are getting a bit confused between the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, which I support and is about anti-competitive behaviour, and people talking against competition. The amendment is quite clear. It asks Monitor, within a year, to identify barriers to quality care that are anti-competitive. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, gave one example and there are others, such as optometry services, which can, if given the opportunity to expand, not only provide good diagnostic services but also treat some minor ailments that do not need referral to hospital. Our amendment is about anti-competitive behaviour. It is not about competition.
Earl Howe
My Lords, there are some extremely helpful amendments in this group. Indeed, there has been a great deal of valuable debate both inside and outside the Chamber on the roles of competition and integration in the health service. I am grateful for much of what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said in his introductory speech.
The Government have been clear that both competition and integration can be important tools for commissioners to drive up the quality of services for patients. We have also been clear that it will be for commissioners to decide where and how these tools should be used—not Monitor. There will be no “one size fits all” or a model prescribed by government.
To help ensure that both competition and integration are effective, Part 3 of the Bill seeks to establish appropriate powers for Monitor. Where there is competition, Monitor will have powers to ensure that it operates effectively in the interests of patients and to safeguard against anti-competitive conduct that can work against those interests. The Future Forum concluded that Monitor, as a sector-specific regulator with knowledge and expertise in health services, would be best placed to achieve this. Let me remind the Committee that this is if there is competition. In some circumstances, I freely concede that commissioners may decide that the best way to achieve high-quality services for patients is not to have competition.
On Amendment 265C, I hope that noble Lords will agree that it is the right approach to require Monitor’s focus to be on considering the interests of patients. That will allow Monitor the scope to take account of a broad range of factors. This approach also provides continuity with the requirements of the existing system rules, the Principles and Rules for Co-operation and Competition, which we have committed to retaining and giving a firmer statutory underpinning through Monitor’s sectoral powers. Those powers are the setting and enforcement of licence conditions for providers and the overseeing of commissioning regulations set by the Secretary of State. Along with the concurrent powers to apply the Competition Act with the Office of Fair Trading, they will provide necessary safeguards to ensure that the interests of patients are protected.
To pick up on the sorts of circumstances cited by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that would include, for example, safeguarding against providers exchanging information to agree lower levels of service quality than they would otherwise supply if they were in competition; or a commissioner removing a well performing provider from the choices available to patients, or seeking to direct patient referrals to one provider and not another on non-clinical grounds.
However, it is not the case that every arrangement in the provision of healthcare that had the effect of restricting competition would necessarily be anti-competitive. I made that point in one of our earlier debates. I look particularly in the direction of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, in saying that Monitor’s core duty means that patients’ interests will always come first. For example, in some cases limiting competition by concentrating specialist services in regional centres or in providing services through a clinical network may deliver overriding benefits to patients and would not, therefore, be anti-competitive. Similarly, where an integrated service raises competition concerns, and equally where services offering more choice and control raise concerns over integration, Monitor will always come back to its core duty—to ask itself the question, “What is it that benefits patients the most?”.
Lord Warner
I want to briefly respond to what the noble Earl said about Amendment 266, particularly in the light of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, made about a good deal of anti-competitive behaviour being already quite well entrenched in the NHS. Simply waiting longer to get it even more entrenched before Monitor has a go at the issue of the barriers for new entrants to the NHS market simply gives the signal to the NHS that it can go on as it has been going on. It seems to me that it is important to give a signal that there is a new show in town and that the issue of the barriers to entry, particularly in the light of the report by the Co-operation and Competition Panel, are going to be addressed. I am not sure that waiting longer for the new systems to settle down is going to be in the best interest of the NHS or Monitor and I wonder if he might think a bit more about this and perhaps we could have a further discussion.
Lord Warner
I beg your pardon. I am rather dozy this afternoon on this group of amendments. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(c) local authorities carry out their duties in providing social care for children in their area, and to the smooth transfer of their caring responsibility when a child moves into adult social care services.”
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, this group of amendments concerns children, particularly their social care. We have laid these amendments because we could find nothing in the Bill that mentions this. Children’s services will be commissioned potentially by six different groups. The Commissioning Board at national and at sub-national level, particularly through health visitors, will be responsible for the public health of children under five—until 2015 when that will transfer to local authorities—and also for primary care. That is often the first point of contact for problems in children which require a great deal of social care intervention integrated with healthcare provision. Public Health England is responsible for public health campaigns and health protection. The clinical commissioning groups will again be involved potentially at two levels; supra-locally and locally. The sixth area is the local authorities with the healthy child programmes for those aged five to 18, school nurses and child health for the nought to five year-olds after 2015, which is when the health visitors transfer.
However, all these different aspects of healthcare interrelate very closely with children’s social care. There are concerns over accountability, how the services will keep track of complex provision and who will be responsible for children’s health and welfare, particularly as regards obese children and those who have been bereaved. There is concern about children’s reaction to grief and the impact that this has on social behaviours, and how the public health services which deal with the prevention of childhood obesity can be evaluated and held to account.
Health visitors are the eyes and ears of the child aspects of primary care. However, there is concern about how they will relate to the primary care and accident and emergency sectors and social workers when they transfer to local authorities. How will the information on the at-risk register be transferred and how will access to primary care records be speeded up? Will the IT systems be compatible to enable effective information transfer between child and adult services, particularly when children who have multiple social problems reach an age when they will be transferred to adult services? There is particular concern about children with severe learning difficulties and developmental delays who require a great deal of social care input. They cannot be their own advocates and are extremely dependent on others. Therefore, it is important that the relevant information is successfully transferred. We know from previous tragic child abuse cases that information which has to be moved from one sector to another often gets lost, drops through the gaps and children suffer as a result.
There must be a smooth transition from one carer to another, particularly where children’s and adult social services are provided by different providers. It is important that adult social services should be satisfied that the children’s social services have done their job properly and thoroughly because, if they have not, the patient will suffer and adult social services may be faced with an unfair cost incurred as a result of a deficiency in the services provided by the children’s social services.
Our amendments do not propose a radical solution to the problem. We are fairly confident that the Government will not accept them as they will not want further major complications in what is already a very complicated Bill. They are simply designed to provide that at some time in the future Monitor will be given the power to check that all providers of children’s social care are doing their job properly, and that when they transfer a child to adult social care there is a smooth and sensitive transfer of responsibility and a complete transfer of information so that there are no gaps through which these children can fall.
We look forward to hearing what the Government’s solution is to this problem. We rather hope that the Minister might offer us some discussions outside the Committee to try to address some of the real problems that arise when children, including those aged nought to five, transfer from children’s services into adult services, given the gaps in information provision which can occur at the transition point. I beg to move.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, it saddens me to say that 41 years ago I became opposition spokesman on the Newcastle City Council health committee. Within two years, we had the Seebohm report and a change of structure, leading to the creation of a social services committee that embraced both children’s and adult social care and replaced two committees—the old health committee and the old children’s committee. That seemed to me then and, frankly, it seems to me now to have been the right approach, because I do not think that you can sensibly divide children’s and adults’ social services. We do not have that system now. My personal view—which is not necessarily the view of the Opposition—is that it may be time to look again at that division. To an extent, the group of amendments that the noble Baroness has spoken to seeks to secure that objective.
As a consequence of the way in which amendments are ordered, the actual order of the amendments in this group is not quite logical. I suppose one should start with Amendment 269B, which would give Monitor functions relating to children’s social care services. Earlier, we touched on the possibility of Monitor having a role in respect of adult care services. Presumably, one would look at both services coming under their auspices, or neither, rather than keeping a division. Amendment 269B sets out the basic role for Monitor in this context. I note that proposed new subsection (2) would include within the functions,
“inspection of, and reporting on, the potential impact of children’s social care services in a particular area on the potential need for adult social care in that area”.
I am tempted to say “and vice versa”, because so often problems of parents and adults impinge on the needs of the children, and that would make perhaps a more rational disposition of functions.
The other two amendments in this group are, in effect, consequential, and sensibly would require local authorities to ensure a smooth transfer and, as Amendment 270AA puts it, “a careful handover” for children moving into adult social care. All of those seem to me very sensible suggestions. Nevertheless, it is probably better to look at the whole context of where social services fall within the remit of the Bill.
I imagine that there will have been some discussions between this department and the Department for Education, although the way in which Whitehall and, for that matter, local government tend to work, it is not necessarily the case that the relevant organisations come together to discuss these issues. It may be, therefore, that the Minister would wish to consult colleagues in other departments before giving a measured response. Perhaps this matter might be best brought back at Report, because it raises significant issues. As I have indicated, I have felt for some time that the division of responsibilities at the moment is not terribly sensible, with children’s social services being, arguably, at best a sort of fifth wheel on an education coach. At the very least, that matter ought to be re-examined. Perhaps it is too late in the day for it to be part of this Bill, but at some point, I think, this issue certainly needs to be referred to. I congratulate the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, on having put down this amendment, which gives us an opportunity at least to ventilate concerns about this issue.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I understand and well appreciate the concern of the noble Baroness to ensure a high standard of children’s social care services and, in particular, a smooth transfer for young people moving from children’s to adult social care services. I would, of course, be very happy to speak to her and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about this issue away from the Committee, if they consider that to be an appropriate way forward.
On the specific amendments that we are looking at, I really do not think that Monitor is the right organisation to ensure that local authorities are carrying out their responsibilities on these issues, or to act as a regulator of children’s social care services. I am confident that existing arrangements for the regulation and inspection of children’s social care are sufficient and robust. Joint working is important and I hope that the noble Baroness will be reassured that the relevant inspectorates are already working together to improve the arrangements for joint inspection, which will address the very important issue of child to adult transition that she has raised.
Children’s social care is regulated and inspected by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills—Ofsted. Its inspection remit covers all local authority social services functions relating to children—that means services for children in need, safeguarding children, children in care and care leavers, as well as adoption and adoption support services. Local authority adoption and fostering functions must be inspected by Ofsted at a minimum of every three years. Ofsted can of course make unannounced inspections.
We are already working to improve these arrangements. Ofsted consulted over the summer on local authority child protection inspection arrangements that will be more child-centred and less bureaucratic. This new type of inspection will begin in May next year. In addition, all relevant inspectorates have agreed in principle to Professor Eileen Munro’s ideal model of joint inspection, which looks at the contribution all services make towards protecting children. Noble Lords may recall that Professor Munro last year conducted a thorough review of child protection arrangements for the Government. The Care Quality Commission is one of the inspectorates working with Ofsted to establish what those services will look like and when they will begin.
For children with special educational needs and disabilities, the recent Green Paper proposes a new education, health and care plan, covering support from birth to 25. The new plan will include a much clearer focus on the long-term outcomes for children and young people including independent living and employment. This should improve outcomes for young people with special educational needs and disabilities as they make the transition from school into employment or training.
I hope that the noble Baroness will appreciate that work in this area is ongoing. I sympathise with the tenor of all she said, but if she is content to wait for a discussion following these Committee proceedings, I hope that she will, in the mean time, withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
I am grateful to the noble Earl for his response. It is those transitional points that we have been particularly concerned about. I will discuss this with the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and it would be helpful for us to have a short meeting. We are grateful for the fullness of the response from the Minister. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I am sure that this was well worth waiting for, but it could be the mouse that roared. We are back to other aspects of Clause 59 on the general duties of Monitor. This amendment and Amendment 267ZB simply aim to ensure that to discharge its functions Monitor has input from HealthWatch England. That is all about patient and public involvement. It seems to me and to my noble friends that Monitor should definitely insert such input into its deliberations. I cannot find in the rest of the Bill any other such duty on HealthWatch England, which after all will have an extraordinarily important role. Many noble Lords have welcomed the new enhanced role for patient and public involvement. I remember the demise of community health councils and the hard-fought debate that took place in about 2004—I cannot remember exactly when—and I very much welcome the new enhanced role for HealthWatch England. However, Monitor will need to be informed by it and I very much hope that the Government will take this on board. I beg to move.
Baroness Murphy
I realise that I have another amendment in this group, and I would have saved the Committee a great deal of disquiet over the numbers if I had spoken to this one in the first place, so my apologies all round. This group of amendments is about how Monitor discharges its functions and what it takes into account. Mine is a probing amendment on whether we have the objectives for Monitor and their number right. Experience from other sectors suggests that if too many policy priorities are set, the regulator can become confused about its primary objectives, which can reduce its effectiveness. I wonder whether we have the clarity of Monitor’s objectives right.
Monitor will find itself in the position of other regulators in having to devise policies, particularly on the tariff, to meet a wide range of objectives over and above its primary duties. The experience of Ofgem, in particular, suggests that the risk might grow over time as the Government seek solutions for new problems as and when they arise. Setting too many policy priorities carries the risk of confusing the regulator about its primary objectives. That might be inevitable, given the complexity of healthcare policy-making, but it means that the accountability of the regulator in discharging those various functions is critical.
For other major economic regulators, the Government have committed themselves to updating the objectives only once in a Parliament and ensuring that objectives are outcome-focused. Monitor's objectives, unusually, will be set in primary legislation. I wonder whether they would be better in secondary guidance, together with a clear process for agreeing changes with the Department of Health, to protect the regulator from political whim. Nevertheless, it has a number of primary duties in Clause 59. In Clause 62 it has to have regard to a number of other matters. Monitor might find it difficult to demonstrate that they are all taken into account when decisions are made, possibly making it open to legal challenge. I wonder whether it is possible to reduce the number of duties.
I have included just one or two as exemplars simply because I think that they duplicate existing duties. In Clause 62(b),
“the desirability of securing continuous improvement in the quality of health care services for the purpose of the NHS”,
which is crucial, duplicates a primary duty in Clause 59(1)(b), so I think it could be removed. Clause 62(c), on,
“the desirability of securing continuous improvement in the efficiency with which health care services are provided for the purposes of the NHS”,
duplicates a duty under Clause 59(1)(a). Surely that could be removed. These are minor, tidying amendments, but if we can clarify for Monitor what its objectives should be, that would be a help to the regulator.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I half spoke previously to the need for Monitor to have regard to complex clinical conditions. I return to that and build on the comments that have just been made, particularly in relation to tariffs.
We are already beginning to see a degree of fragmentation through systems such as “choose and book”. We heard on a previous day in Committee about the problems for patients with various complex conditions, who have to be sent back to their general practitioner to be able to access a different discipline in secondary care and how their care then becomes fragmented. If you are going to provide good integrated care and improve clinical outcomes, you need all the different systems of the patient to be addressed simultaneously—the psychological and welfare areas as well as the different physiological systems that might be affected by a range of pathologies.
I remind the House that it is much easier when people are not terribly ill. When they do become terribly ill, more and more systems fail and become involved: cardiac complications, overwhelming infection, renal failure and potential dialysis might all be involved, and if there has also been trauma with orthopaedics there might be a lot of complex psychological conditions relating to whatever has happened to the person. They all need to come together around that patient. The patient cannot be parcelled off from one service to another or people be brought in sequentially like small aliquots of opinion.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I apologise that my enthusiasm for Amendment 274ZZB caused me to speak to it partially in an earlier group. The amendment in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, was put down because we regard it as a probing amendment to the end of Clause 62 that relates to matters that Monitor must have regard to in the exercise of its functions. Its purpose is to raise the issue of the financial stability and governance of adult social care providers in the light of the Southern Cross experience, and to seek the views of the Government on how they propose to use the new regulatory system in the Bill to protect the vulnerable users of adult social care services from providers whose financial structures are fundamentally unstable.
Let me say at the outset that I thought that the Department of Health managed quite well the difficult situation that Southern Cross presented. Few, if any, elderly people had their care seriously disrupted. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing in public policy post-mortems. The truth is that across the political spectrum few were alert to the dangers of overleveraged providers of adult social care. However, we are now alert to the dangers of creative financing arrangements in this area, particularly those instituted by boards of management that do not hang around to face the consequences of their action but simply take the money and run.
It is clear that the way in which care providers are financed and their governance wraparound are matters for rigorous inquiry before they are allowed to contract for the provision of services to vulnerable people. In the case of adult social care, this relates not simply to elderly people whose adult social care is funded by the state but to self-payers. Most of these service providers have a mix of state and self-funders in their homes, with many of the self-funders in effect subsidising the state-funded residents in today’s inadequately funded, state-financed, adult social care. That inadequate funding is itself going to cause some providers to withdraw from the market, and others to merge. It will also distort future investment decisions by those who wish to enter this market, because they will favour investments that concentrate on self-funders.
We face a period of turbulence and uncertainty in the adult social care provider market that makes the detailed working of the regulatory system even more important. That is particularly the case with the positive flood of findings of unsatisfactory care of elderly people in the NHS and adult social care environments. The question of how providers are financed and governed is an integral part of ensuring stable and quality care environments for vulnerable groups. A bright light needs to be shone on these areas in a new regulatory system. Can the Minister say how the Government are going to proceed on this issue and what role Monitor should play? Do the Government intend to move quickly to bring adult social care into Monitor’s remit, or do they see some other approach being pursued? I recognise the heavy burden that is already being placed on Monitor and the range of things that it now has to do. However, I think that the Committee needs to know whether and when this will be transferred to Monitor or whether other mechanisms will be used. The purpose of this amendment is to find out the Government’s intentions.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, I support the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady Finlay because this is an extremely important matter. When I was a consultant working as a neurologist in the NHS, if I had a patient who, for instance, had a peripheral neuropathy and turned out to be diabetic, I had no problem in referring him to a colleague within the same hospital for the care of his diabetes or to a colleague in the ophthalmology department for the care of his eyes. I am horrified to discover that in the recent past such individuals have been told to go back to their GP for yet another referral to a different consultant. This is an extraordinary situation. Can the Minister assure us that something in the Bill will stop this kind of nonsense occurring?
Baroness Pitkeathley
My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 274ZZB in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Warner. In the debate on Wednesday last, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, referred to health and social care as being in a symbiotic relationship. That is supposed to be recognised in the title of the Bill, but in fact we have had very few debates about that relationship, other than the fact that everybody says that integration is important and that patients do not understand why such integration has always proved so difficult. We agree that, as patients’ needs are comprehensive—especially patients with long-term conditions—we need comprehensiveness in addressing those needs.
The other thing that we always agree about is that, to meet the Nicholson challenge, services have to be reconfigured so that more services are provided in the home and in the community, instead of in expensive hospitals. Today’s King’s Fund report reminds us of the difficulties that many London hospitals are currently facing, yet reconfiguration is still resisted, not least sometimes by MPs, who should know better.
Another thing on which there is usually agreement is that as social care is just as important to patients and their families as healthcare, it should be given the same status as healthcare. We may agree about that, yet social care plainly does not have that status, despite the commitment to care services of the Minister, his officials at the Department of Health and indeed the noble Earl himself. This amendment seeks to ensure that, no matter who the provider is, the provision of adult social care services is on a sound financial footing and with corporate governance that ensures proper oversight. That is surely necessary beyond question, given the recent Southern Cross debacle to which my noble friend has referred, with the prospect of more such disasters.
As we know, health and social care have always been organised and funded by different groups—one centrally and the other by local authorities. However, as my noble friend reminded the Committee in a debate last week, the majority of the money spent on adult social care by local authorities is in fact funded centrally and passed to local authorities, which commission the services. This amount of money is not sufficient, especially in view of the fact that rising demand has been well established, most recently by the Dilnot commission. It seems that the only way to get more money into the system in these hard times is, first, by showing that money spent on social care will save money in the long term and, secondly, by ensuring that the money is effectively, efficiently and safely spent. Involving Monitor in the way suggested in this probing amendment would go a long way to enabling us to do this better. I can do no better than quote from the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, when she said in our debate last Wednesday:
“The biggest single thing that will make the Bill work or not work is whether everyone in the NHS sees it as their responsibility to understand and work with social care”.—[Official Report, 7/12/11; col. 759.]
Placing this responsibility on Monitor or otherwise advising the Committee how that responsibility will be exercised would be very important in helping us to achieve that aim.
Lord Nickson
My Lords, I am afraid that I was not present at Second Reading but I am moved to support this amendment on a personal basis as my wife is in long-term social care in Scotland. It was a Southern Cross home that has now been taken over by Healthcare One. It would have been a comfort to me had I known that an organisation such as Monitor was supervising the very unhappy situation in Southern Cross, but I have to say that the communications from the local authority concerned in Scotland both with me and Southern Cross as it was in its death throes were absolutely first class in attempting to reassure and keep us in touch with what was happening. I am equally glad to say that all the information and everything coming now from Healthcare One is very reassuring and makes one full of confidence. It would have been reassuring had something like Monitor been in the background looking at this sort of situation well in advance. I support the amendment.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I am happy to endorse all the amendments in this group, with the exception of Amendment 270. I particularly endorse Amendment 274ZZB tabled by my noble friend Lord Warner. He is 100 per cent right in this context. I have to say in confidence to the Committee that I do not always entirely agree with my noble friend, but he is exactly on the right lines today. The situation to which he referred clearly causes great concern. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Nickson, that fortunately matters turned out reasonably well in his case and that of his wife, but who is to say that that would always be the case? I hope that the Minister will feel able to take on board the suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Warner. As he said, it is a probing amendment but it is one that I hope will lead to an outcome that will guarantee that problems of the kind generated and disclosed in the Southern Cross affair will not arise again so that those in residential care and their carers and families will have greater confidence in the system—a confidence that must have been shaken by events in recent months.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, this is the group of amendments that we almost came to earlier this afternoon. I hope that noble Lords who thought that their issues would be in that last group have now gathered them together, as they are back in this group. The amendments cover a number of issues, including patient and public involvement in Monitor’s work and the advice that it should take. The Government are clear that Monitor should involve patients and the public in its decisions and get appropriate clinical advice to enable it to carry out its functions. That is why in another place we introduced Clause 59(7), which creates a duty on patient and public involvement, and Clause 59(8), which creates a duty to obtain clinical advice. For Monitor to carry out effective patient involvement, it will almost certainly need help from people or organisations with expertise. Here I address in particular Amendment 267A, and Amendment 267B in the name of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones and others.
However, setting this out in the Bill could constrain Monitor’s flexibility to decide how and when it sought such help. We do not want to create bureaucratic and potentially costly arrangements that would require Monitor to take such advice even when it was unnecessary. I hope that, over time, Monitor will develop expertise in how best to involve patients and the public in its decisions, reducing its dependence on professional advice in this area.
Lord Warner
Perhaps I could ask the noble Baroness to go a little further. Does she envisage that after this consultation, the Government are going to require primary legislation to take effective action in this area, or are the Government confident that there are sufficient powers to enable them to deal with that, either by guidance or secondary legislation?
Baroness Northover
Perhaps the noble Lord is seeking for me to pre-empt what will emerge from the discussion document that I mentioned. It is extremely important that this is considered fully and carefully. Therefore, it would be inappropriate for me to pre-empt the conclusions of that—tempting though it might be.
Lord Warner
Perhaps I could pursue this a little further. Is the Minister saying that the current legislation is insufficient and therefore the Government are consulting on what strengthening might be needed? Surely it is possible that this great and glorious machine, the Department of Health and its lawyers, can tell Ministers whether the current legislation is adequate to deal with this issue.
Baroness Northover
The noble Lord himself mentioned that things did not work out quite as badly as one might have expected. I know that my honourable friend Paul Burstow was working night and day to make sure that that was the case. However, I will resist the noble Lord’s invitation to pre-empt the conclusions of those who are far more expert than I am on this matter.
Lord Warner
I asked a very straightforward question. I am quite happy to pursue this through a Written Question. I just want to know whether the Government consider that the current primary legislation is adequate to deal with this particular issue. That seems to me a yes or no answer, but if the noble Baroness would prefer me to put down a Written Question, I am quite happy to do so.
Baroness Northover
I seem to have been inspired. We do not need primary legislation, it seems, we need regulations subject to the affirmative procedure. However, we are consulting on the best approach to using these. I am sure that that informs the noble Lord far better than my earlier answer, but I return to the point that it is extremely important that we get this right, because we certainly do not want to find ourselves in a situation where things are not as well protected as they were in this last instance.
I will now briefly address government Amendment 270A, which is a minor and technical amendment that makes clear that Monitor is concerned with services provided for the purposes of the NHS. On that basis, I hope that noble Lords will be happy to support it and content to withdraw their own amendments.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, this is a slightly disparate group of amendments so I will certainly not try to respond on any other amendments apart from my own.
I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for signposting where patient and public involvement come in, in Clause 59(7) and Clause 178, and her explanation that my amendment would “constrain Monitor’s flexibility”. I am always interested in the kinds of response that the department is able to come up with in these circumstances. After all, HealthWatch and the local healthwatch organisations are the creatures of this Bill and of the department, so it seems somewhat extraordinary that these are not specifically mentioned in Clause 59(7). I understand that in broad terms Monitor has the duty to,
“secure that people who use healthcare services, and other members of the public, are involved to an appropriate degree”—
that is a useful word as well—
“in decisions that Monitor makes about the exercise of its functions”.
However, of course, “appropriate” is determined by Monitor. It is not an objective test in those circumstances.
Baroness Northover
I am sorry to interrupt my noble friend, but perhaps I did not make it clear enough that Clause 178 of the Bill allows HealthWatch England to give Monitor advice and provides that Monitor must respond to that.
Lord Clement-Jones
Yes, my Lords, absolutely. I read that with great interest following my noble friend’s speech. However, of course it is still liable to be one-way traffic in terms of healthcare, HealthWatch being the demandeur, rather than being asked by Monitor to provide its advice at the very early stage. So it is not always possible for HealthWatch to know what is in train within the bowels of Monitor, if I may say so, and it will be up to HealthWatch to be extremely nimble in order to divine what is happening within the councils of Monitor, if I may put it that way.
I therefore take the Minister’s reply to be a rather less than whole-hearted endorsement of the role of HealthWatch. That may not be the right interpretation, but it seems a bit strange to be a bit mealy mouthed about HealthWatch when it is actually being created by this Bill. However, I will wait as matters unfold. No doubt we will get to Clause 178 in due course, and I look forward to it. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, Monitor has a range of duties which could potentially conflict with each other. Of course, we have discussed that previously, and it is recognised in Clause 63 of the Bill.
In specialised care, it is sometimes desirable to limit the number of providers to ensure that patient volumes are sufficient to support clinical expertise and high quality, safe services, an approach which was promoted by the Bristol inquiry and enshrined in the Carter report on specialised commissioning in 2006. This is entirely consistent with Monitor’s main duty under Clause 59(1), to
“protect and promote the interests of people who use health care services by promoting provision of health care services which is economic, efficient and effective, and maintains or improves the quality of the services”.
However, in terms of one of Monitor’s duties under Clause 59(3), to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, this could potentially be described as a restriction of competition. It is therefore important, I believe, to get a clear understanding that Monitor’s paramount duty should be towards the safety of patients, or, to put this another way, towards their welfare. In other words, it is legitimate for competition to be restricted in the NHS where it is in the interests of patient safety.
This amendment is designed to seek clarification that Monitor’s role in preventing anti-competitive behaviour will not debar the designation of providers of specialised services. I beg to move.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I have an amendment in this group which really builds on the amendment already spoken to comprehensively and efficiently by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones—that is, to not impose a burden on providers in the process.
One of the difficulties in any type of regulation or inspection is that it is very easy for those who are doing the inspection to require more and more data from a provider to support whatever they view as their outcome and their inspection processes. There is a real danger in here that sometimes the regulatory processes can develop a life of their own, and, quite inadvertently, become a burden on providers. We have already seen that occur with some of the current inspection processes in place, which seem to have collected an inordinate amount of data sometimes, but have missed out on real deficits in care.
It is a paramount duty towards the safety of people who use healthcare services, and built into that of course will be good clinical outcomes, because bad clinical outcomes will be unsafe in the process. However, it is also a suggestion—and this is therefore a probing amendment—that the regulatory burden on the providers must not be excessive. They must be able to deliver patient care without diverting resources away from it in order to meet requirements from a regulator.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I find it not entirely surprising that a number of us this afternoon have found it difficult to know at exactly what point we should be making the contribution that we wanted to make, because of course there is an immense overlap between the themes that all the clauses we have been reviewing today have brought forward.
All those clauses, and most of the amendments to them, necessarily derive from a single decision by the Government. This was the decision that they wanted to distance the Secretary of State from the operations of the health service and superimpose a set of bureaucracies and regulators that would in future take on the responsibility that the Secretary of State has had until now. That was a decision that has had, and will have, a lot of consequences.
Three consequences in particular are very unfortunate. The first is that there will inevitably be a lack of transparency. You may impose on Monitor the obligation to produce the annual report and occasional statements on the decisions it takes, and impose on clinical commissioning boards, foundation trusts and other bodies within the NHS an obligation to try to relate to the local public and have meetings and report to them and so on. However, you will never get the degree of close oversight that you can get in Parliament when the important decisions are taken by the Secretary of State in Parliament, where they are subject to a weekly or, when necessary, daily scrutiny. That does not apply to the functional decisions, which I will come to in a moment. That is the first inevitable cost of this proposal by the Government.
The second consequence is the cost to democracy. People will no longer feel that the health service is being delivered by their democracy, or is part of their democracy. It will increasingly be delivered by relatively remote and autonomous bureaucracies which will no doubt be staffed by the most high-minded people—a sort of platonic mandarinate who will certainly deliver the best they can for the human beings in their care. However, that is a very different concept from the democratically driven concept of the National Health Service on which a lot of us were brought up and which was, of course, the vision of Beveridge and Bevan.
The third consequence, to which I turn in specific detail, relates directly to the clause and amendments before us. Many contradictions and conflicts of interest will be created in the organisations and bureaucracy that take over the Secretary of State’s role. Until now the Secretary of State has been responsible for taking those decisions that are properly political decisions in the true sense of the word. They involve priorities, value judgments, trade-offs and strategic decisions for the future, which have properly been decisions of the Secretary of State up to now. Many of them will now be taken by someone else, particularly Monitor, which will take over from the Secretary of State the job of making sure that the whole system works. I have no doubt that the Government hope that that will work out well, but I repeat that I think that the effort, the initiative, is misconceived.
Two types of conflict will inevitably be structurally hardwired into Monitor. There will be the functional conflicts to which I have already referred. Monitor has specific, specialised responsibility for licensing and overseeing foundation trusts and making sure that problems are ironed out. That is one particular sector on the provider side of the equation. It now has a whole lot of responsibility for everyone else on the provider side and for the supplier side. There are some inherent conflicts.
There are also philosophical conflicts. Monitor is being given very many criteria. Clause 59 sets out what probably most of us would write if we were asked to write the most important targets of the health service on the back of an envelope. However, there is no attempt to establish a hierarchy and there will be conflicts between them the whole time. In the short term at least there could be serious conflicts between increases in efficiency, for example in access and improvement in care, and in all the other virtuous objectives set out in that clause.
The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, have brought forward their own solution. They say, “Well, let us take one criteria, make that the overriding criteria and then Monitor won’t have a conflict any more”. That is how I understand the logic of what they propose. Perhaps I may disagree for a moment with the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. It is not right to say that she builds on the suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, because her proposal comes under different criteria. The noble Lord thinks that the safety of the patient is the most important thing, and the noble Baroness thinks that it is not to place too great a burden on providers. Both are admirable considerations, but by definition they cannot both be the overriding determining consideration where there is otherwise a conflict between desirable objectives. That will occur the whole time. These two amendments highlight the problem created by the way that the Government have decided to approach the future of healthcare in this country.
I turn now to the Government’s answer to the problem that I have set out. It is quite extraordinary. Clause 63(2) states:
“Monitor must act so as to secure that there is not, and could not reasonably be regarded as being, a conflict between”,
its responsibilities, which in this case are foundation trusts, and the rest. How can Monitor possibly act as if there is not conflict if there is a conflict? You cannot just pretend that there is not conflict and think that that means that the conflict has disappeared. That does not work at all. The same thing applies to subsection (3), which states:
“Monitor must ignore the functions it has under sections 109 and 111 when exercising … its functions under Chapter 2 … and Chapter 4”.
What exactly does that mean? It cannot be ignored. Of course, Clause 109 is about when a foundation trust runs into difficulty. When that happens the Government cannot wish away the fact that the foundation trust has a difficulty; they have a responsibility to resolve it. Perhaps they mean that there will be a department looking after the foundation trust’s problems but that it will not be allowed to speak to the departments with the general responsibility that Monitor exercises across the rest of the health service.
If that is what the Government are saying, perhaps they should say it explicitly. But if they are going to set up two separate departments which will not be allowed to talk to each other—there is a kind of negative synergy in an organisation having two functions of that sort—why not have two separate organisations? What is the logic for having Monitor at all if it will have to operate in this extraordinary way? I have intervened because the Government need to tell us clearly, before we agree Clause 63 and accept this Bill into the legislation of this country, exactly how they propose to grapple with the serious problems that their decision has created. I do not think that we will accept in this House that their decisions can simply be wished or thought away.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, I can address my Amendment 274ZB very quickly. I have to admit that it arises from a fog of misunderstanding. Frankly, I do not know what this subsection means. Under Clause 63(3), there can be a Monitor intervention in a situation where Sections 109 and 111, which address themselves to various aspects of foundation trusts, can be completely waived without any regard to the fact that they are looking at competition and pricing as regards profoundly sensitive subjects. I wish that I could say that I know what it means but I do not. Instead I have put down an amendment which simply proposes leaving out that subsection. If the Minister can enlighten me, perhaps I will put it back in again. At the moment, I simply do not know what I would be putting in or out. I apologise to the House for such absurd and detailed ignorance, to which I confess with great humility. But I hope that the Minister will be able to enlighten me because so far no one else has been able to do so.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, at Second Reading I made a jocular reference to Monitor, recalling that it is also the name of a carnivorous reptile. Having regard to the range of duties and responsibilities that the Bill seeks to impose on Monitor and the number of organisations with which it will have to work—ranging from the Competition Commission, the Office of Fair Trading, the national Commissioning Board, clinical commissioning groups to foundation trusts—carnivorous seems to be the wrong word. Omnivorous would appear to be a better term for the job which the Government seek to give to this unaccountable body.
We certainly accept the need for an organisation—Monitor is no doubt the appropriate one—to be responsible for the rigorous financial regulation of all providers to the National Health Service. We approve the concept of a licensing scheme. Where we part company from the Government is that we do not accept that the handing over of economic regulation of the whole of the health service to an unaccountable quango—it is unaccountable—is the right course of action. We think that oversight of the whole system should remain vested in the Secretary of State, as opposed to the detailed regulation of individual parts of that system. Therefore, we think that there are two distinct roles.
We are particularly reluctant to envisage the wider scope that the Bill seeks to confer on Monitor in the light of what its chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Owen, who is not now in his place, reminded us this morning. He was at pains to make it clear that there is an analogy between the health service and the utilities. He cited the railways, gas, water and electricity. The whole nation of course resounds with rejoicing from the users of the railways, and gas, electricity and water, who are thrilled with the services that they obtain and the prices that they have to pay. That, apparently, is the model which recommends itself to the chairman of Monitor.
Much has been said in some thoughtful, forceful and frankly brilliant expositions today by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Owen, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and other noble Lords about the need to have a discrete function of dealing with the foundation trusts and the rest of Monitor’s responsibilities. Some of that is encompassed within amendments, such as Amendment 274ZB, that are before us this evening. That seems to be right: in particular, if the fears of the noble Lord, Lord Owen, about the position of foundation trusts in relation to European competition law are to be realised, then it is all the more necessary for a continuing role for Monitor in relation to foundation trusts. We certainly see this not merely as a transitional provision, but one for the longer term.
There is a job for Monitor to do, but there is a clear risk of conflict for the organisation in the terms that the Bill now provides. They may be so conflicted as to require the attentions of the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, if they have to resolve these potential conflicts of interest, and that would not be in anybody’s interest. The Government really should think again about what they expect of Monitor and how it is to be rendered accountable, because there is clearly a widely shared view in the Committee and the House generally that the present prescription is simply not adequate for the purposes that the Government wish to see carried out.
Earl Howe
My Lords, Clause 63 sets out several provisions detailing how Monitor should deal with potential conflicts in relation to its general duties, and conflicts with regard to its functions. It would be helpful to cover each of these in turn. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, will not be surprised to learn that I did not agree with much of what he said. We should not find it surprising, because it is not uncommon for bodies to have potential conflicts of interest. What matters is how they are dealt with, and the Bill sets out a robust framework for Monitor to operate effectively. In theory, there is a possibility that Monitor’s general duties, as set out in Clauses 59 and 62, might conflict—if, for example, the most economic, efficient and effective provision did not deliver fair access because that access was limited to certain days and times or locations. If a conflict did arise, we are clear that it would need to be resolved effectively.
In order to be a successful independent regulator, Monitor would need to be able to resolve any conflicts that may arise. It would be closest to these conflicts, and it would be best able to weigh up the potential risks and benefits. Balancing competing priorities is just a reality of life, and resolving such conflicts is a key function that all public bodies need to carry out. When considering how to resolve conflicts, we believe that Monitor should do so in the manner it considers best, in line with its overarching duty to protect and promote patients’ interests. I am not going to call patients “consumers”, but in response to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, who has tempted me, it was Alan Milburn who said in 2004, when he was Secretary of State for Health:
“In the business world success today depends on being flexible enough to innovate and responsive enough to meet consumer demands. Public services have to apply the same lessons”.
I do not want to press that analogy too far, but we all know what we are talking about when we talk of patients as consumers who require the same kind of care in terms of centring priorities on their interests.
I want to reassure the Committee that when resolving any conflict, Monitor would have to take into account the need to maintain the safety of the people who use healthcare services. Indeed, Monitor would be able to take this and a range of other issues into account when resolving any conflict between its duties. However, Amendment 274ZA would go further. Its impact would be that, in resolving any conflicts between its general duties, Monitor would always act with a view to maximising safety—potentially at the expense of its other duties. This would be inappropriate: it could cut across the role of the CQC, not to mention potentially undermine the role of commissioners and the independence of clinicians. It could also undermine individual patient choice. I can elaborate on that if noble Lords would like me to.
Similarly, while I sympathise with the desire to ensure that providers do not face unnecessary burdens, there may be occasions where a conflict solution that imposes the least burden on providers is not the most effective. Amendment 274ZAA, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, would impose resolutions that prioritised the least burden on providers over all other considerations. I think that is a mistaken way to go. We believe that Monitor should be free to decide how best to resolve conflicts between its duties, and therefore I would encourage the noble Lords who tabled these amendments to withdraw them. Nevertheless, I will consider—as I indicated earlier—whether it would be appropriate for the Bill to rationalise within Clause 62 matters to which Monitor must have regard. This would help Monitor decide how to resolve any conflicts. Therefore, I hope noble Lords will appreciate that I am not impervious to their suggestions on this clause.
Let me turn now to potential conflicts between Monitor’s functions. For clarity, Monitor’s functions include those it has as sector regulator, which are: ensuring continued access to NHS services; setting and regulating prices; preventing anti-competitive behaviour and licensing providers of NHS services. In the short term, Monitor would also continue with specific oversight functions over foundation trusts. As with Monitor’s duties, we need to ensure that any conflict between these functions is resolved effectively. Clause 63(2) requires Monitor to make arrangements to avoid potential conflicts of interest between its specific functions as foundation trust regulator and its broader functions as sector regulator, which are provided for in this Bill. I think we are all clear that we need to have appropriate arrangements within Monitor to mitigate and manage potential conflicts of interest between its functions. The Bill does not prescribe exactly what arrangements Monitor should make for this; it gives Monitor flexibility to determine the most effective arrangements, but we would expect that this would necessarily involve some separation of decision-making. This may need to be underpinned by informational separation and other working arrangements at operational level.
Lord Beecham
Would such proposals by Monitor have to be approved by the Secretary of State or would it be left entirely to Monitor to decide without reference to the Secretary of State?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I think we will rely on Monitor to make its own arrangements and, as the Committee will appreciate, there are limits to how far it is sensible to prescribe in legislation what the arrangements should be. Nevertheless, picking up the noble Lord’s prompt, I am sympathetic to the concerns that have been raised in this general area and I undertake to discuss the matter further with Monitor.
To create legal certainty, Clause 63(3) clarifies Monitor’s arrangements to resolve conflicts further, so when preventing anti-competitive behaviour and setting and regulating prices, Monitor must ignore its transitional regulatory functions relating to foundation trusts. I hope that addresses Amendment 274ZB, tabled in the name of my noble friend Lady Williams. The meaning of this provision—
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, the noble Earl keeps on referring to Monitor’s responsibilities towards foundation trusts as being transitional, but I recall that earlier today he accepted that in fact they would possibly continue beyond 2016, which is five years away. It hardly seems possible that he should be saying that at one moment and then at the next using the argument that since these responsibilities are only transitional, the conflict of interest will rapidly resolve itself.
Earl Howe
I refer the noble Lord to the remarks I made earlier. The provisions are partly transitional and partly not. It depends on which functions we are looking at.
I come back to the point I was making on the amendment tabled in the name of my noble friend. This provision says that in preventing anti-competitive behaviour that is against patients’ interests or in setting prices, Monitor must ignore the transitional functions it has as the regulator of foundation trusts. If the subsection were left out as the amendment proposes—although I know that it is only a probing amendment—when undertaking its anti-competitive behaviour or pricing functions, Monitor could also consider its transitional intervention powers. That could result in Monitor treating struggling foundation trusts preferentially by, for example, not subjecting them to its anti-competitive powers. I hope that that is helpful to my noble friend.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones spoke about the designation of specialist centres and expressed his view that that should not conflict with the prohibitions on anti-competitive behaviour and that, in essence, patients’ interests have to be paramount. I am with him on this and I would like to reassure him that patients’ interests would be the paramount consideration for Monitor in resolving conflicts that arise in the exercise of its functions in this way. Monitor need not take issue with decisions to designate specialist centres where this would improve quality and protect patient safety, even if it reduced competition.
I hope that those remarks are helpful and that my noble friend will feel content to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply, which I have found very helpful. It was robust in one sense and has set out a robust framework in another. Although I was also interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Davies, had to say, in that it would tie us all in knots, I think that the Minister’s exposition was clear in that it has set out a suitable conflict framework. Although I cannot speak for my noble friend Lady Williams, I thought that the Minister explained the necessity for Clause 63(3) very well. His reassurance on the aspect of patients’ interests was extremely helpful as well, although of course it does not mean that the spectre of EU competition law does not still haunt us somewhat and that it will continue to be the subject of discussion, perhaps outside this Chamber. After all, that could override everything else if we are not careful.
I took considerable comfort from the Minister’s undertaking to review Clause 62 as well, because that is quite a shopping list. If it could be clarified, that would be helpful. His general undertaking to the Committee on the conflict area was also very helpful. In the circumstances, I am happy to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I want to make a brief comment in response to the Minister’s reply to my amendment in the group, Amendment 274ZAA. He said that he was minded to rationalise the items in Clause 63 and therefore I feel that I must put in a formal plea that research, education and training should not be deleted from the list in the process of rationalisation. Having said that, I shall not press my amendment.
Lord Clement-Jones
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, we have gone on rather far. Amendment 276 has not been moved, but that amendment marked the beginning of a group which includes two amendments of mine. In that case, I shall move them when we come to them.
Baroness Thornton
“Duty as to continuous improvement
(1) Regulations must provide that commissioners have a duty to make arrangements to secure continuous improvement in the way in which their functions are exercised, having regard to a combination of economy, efficiency and effectiveness.
(2) Such continuous improvement is to involve—
(a) consideration of costs,(b) making the most of money spent, and(c) making sure that services meet the needs of patients, communities and the priorities agreed in any Health and Wellbeing Strategy.(3) For the purpose of deciding how to fulfill the duty, commissioners must consult the relevant Health and Wellbeing Boards, patients and public, as provided in the regulations.
(4) Commissioners must conduct reviews of the services commissioned in accordance with the regulations, and publish the results.
(5) In conducting a review a commissioner—
(a) shall aim to improve the way in which its commissioning of services is exercised, having regard to a combination of economy, efficiency and effectiveness, and(b) shall have regard to any guidance issued by the Secretary of State under this section. (6) Regulations may specify matters which commissioners must include in a review of a service under this section, and in particular may require a commissioner—
(a) to consider whether the current providers of the service were meeting all reasonable requirements;(b) to consider the extent to which competition for the provision of the service may or may not be appropriate;(c) to consider its objectives in relation to commissioning the service;(d) to assess its performance as regards the commissioning of the current provider;(e) to consider the outcome of consultation with relevant persons and bodies as specified in the regulations.(7) Regulations may specify the circumstances for use of tenders as a result of a service review in order to sustain continuous improvement.
(8) These regulations may include—
(a) single tender actions,(b) restricted tenders,(c) open market tenders.”
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, we have yet again leapt to a larger group, and I know that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, will get his turn, although possibly not until after dinner. We have moved on to a large group of amendments that concern pricing and the setting of tariffs. Many other noble Lords have tabled amendments in this group, as indeed has the Minister. I do not intend to make a long speech, but I will address the issue of pricing.
On reading the Bill you would think that having a tariff in the sense of a complete list of NHS services with all the prices and currencies set out was just around the corner, but I suggest that that is a bit of a myth. Even well developed healthcare systems that are much more market-orientated than our NHS are still a long way from such a state; we are years or perhaps decades away from that condition. For a start, for many services there are no data—not just bad or incomplete data, but none. Getting the datasets defined, collecting the data, then making the analysis, road-testing and rollout will take time. The Minister might like to tell us just how large the team in the Department of Health working on this task is, because I have to say that I heard that it is small and getting smaller as the cuts bite. But, of course, there is always KPMG or McKinsey to step in. Apart from anything else, it seems that this Bill is intent on creating a lot of jobs for lawyers and now, we see, for accountants too.
We are in the midst of a major argument about how relevant different types of currency and tariff might be, with some suggesting that returning to block payments might be better, in the interest of integration, stability and cohesion. This has been stamped on by the operating framework but that does not mean that it will not happen. Using choice and the right financial incentives to drive change in the system is the new orthodoxy. Some are trying to find out how different currencies, uses of penalties and fines and even bonus payments can reward good outcomes and deter bad. This has now extended to how to incentivise integration. These are all problems for which we would like to have answers. We are years away from a system where all these levers are available in the way that the Bill likes to suggest that they are.
In mentioning the framework, we should point out that the re-emergence of price competition shows the need for some communication between the chief executive and the Secretary of State.
Who, then, sets the prices? The arguments are well balanced. My noble friend Lord Warner argues in his book that it should be the national Commissioning Board. He is not in his place at the moment, but I have read his book. However, the national Commissioning Board is in the ludicrous position of also being the commissioner of local services. Monitor may also be compromised, as it is aligned to providers. So we return to the role of the Secretary of State. In any event it must surely be for the Secretary of State to determine the strategic approach, namely the global uplift or reduction. Our priorities for a system as determined by the Secretary of State also need translating so that the incentives are aligned to the desired outcomes, something the NHS has not always been good at. If the Secretary of State determines the approach within the strategy, then we may need genuine independent input into the detailed work of pricing and tariff. At the very least, a full list of the proposed tariffs should be published along with all the data and the analysis, so that the big brains of people at organisations like the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Foundation can tell everyone what is wrong.
Widespread consultation before any major change is a good idea, as is road testing changes before inflicting them and all the suffering of the unintended consequences that may arise. In the end, we think that the Secretary of State must make the strategic decisions in this crucial part of the economic architecture. It cannot be handed over to a quango.
The details of the amendments in my name and the name of my noble friend are as follows. Amendment 277B would insert a new clause which would place a duty on commissioners as to the continuous improvement in terms of cost, value for money and the needs of patients. It would also encourage co-operation with health and well-being boards, patients and the public. It would allow the Secretary of State to issue guidance, via regulations, including in relation to whether,
“competition for the provision of a service may or may not be appropriate”,
and in relation to,
“the circumstances for use of tenders as a result of a service review”.
Noble Lords who were here this morning—which now seems like a long time ago—may remember that, when I explained the overall purpose of our amendments to reconfigure Part 3 of the Bill, the setting of prices was part of that.
Amendments 288J and 289 are about setting a national tariff: they would make it a matter of policy for the Secretary of State, and not a matter for Monitor. Amendment 291B would ensure that regulations relating to the national tariff must state how the prices and methods were determined and how any proposed changes to the national tariff,
“will be subject to proper evaluation and testing” ,
as well as dealing with evidence of consultation between the Secretary of State and Monitor. As the national tariff should not vary in relation to different descriptions of provider, Amendment 292ZC would deal with that issue and the issue of a preferred provider. Monitor should also have no powers over commissioners—in this instance, in relation to the tariff—as commissioners are regulated by the board. We oppose the question that Clauses 116 to 121 stand part of the Bill, because we believe that the Secretary of State should set the national tariff: if the Secretary of State were to set the national tariff, then those clauses would be unnecessary. Once more, as you can see, we are reducing the size of this part through our amendments.
Amendment 294LA would insert a provision that regulations must be laid to issue “guidance on the circumstances” in which there can be local modification of prices. That decision should not be for commissioners and the providers of healthcare services alone. Amendment 294LB would provide that any local modifications of prices would occur with the approval of both Monitor and the board. Amendment 294LC also concerns local modifications of prices: it would ensure that if they were approved, Monitor would have to notify the relevant health and well-being boards. Amendment 294MA deals with situations in which a provider fails to reach an agreement with a commissioner about local variation of prices: in such circumstances it would allow Monitor to authorise such changes only,
“with the consent of the Board”.
Amendment 294MB would ensure that no modification of prices could happen,
“without the consent of the Secretary of State”.
In the area of the setting of prices we are perfectly happy to acknowledge that this may not be a perfect set of amendments. But we think that the very important matter of who sets the prices, and where the accountabilities lie, needs to be discussed. I beg to move.
Lord Butler of Brockwell
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 288H and 291A, in my name and the names of the noble Lords, Lord Newton of Braintree and Lord Turnberg. The amendments are related. Like other amendments in this group, they relate to the tariff—that is, the remuneration which a healthcare provider receives for a healthcare service. The amendments to which I am speaking are designed to facilitate the introduction of new treatments made possible by the development of new technology. When an innovative treatment requires a new procedure code or an updated healthcare resource group classification, a new code can take up to three years to be implemented and a new healthcare research group can take up to six years to develop. Meanwhile, NHS trusts cannot be remunerated for potentially useful and cost-effective improvements made possible by new technology.
In Germany, an intermediate step has been developed, under which providers can apply for an on-top payment while a new code is being developed. This is known in Germany as the NUB system, although I hope that noble Lords will not ask me to say what NUB stands for. These amendments provide for a similar “innovation tariff” to be provided in the United Kingdom, to allow for providers to be remunerated for an innovative procedure on a temporary basis while a new procedure code or healthcare research group is being developed.
These amendments are in line with the Government’s Strategy for UK Life Sciences, which was published last week, but are not already covered by it. I hope therefore that the Minister will give sympathetic consideration to the introduction of arrangements of this sort to facilitate the introduction of health improvements made possible by new technology.
Baroness Gould of Potternewton
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 292A. As it stands, Clause 114(11) will have a negative effect on the provision of sexual and reproductive health services. This arises from the transfer of sexual health commissioning, along with public health, to local authorities.
Clause 114 requires Monitor to publish “the national tariff”, but an amendment put down by the Government in the other place inserted subsection (11), which specifically exempts public health services from the national tariff. As sexual health services are set to be a public health responsibility, it will mean that genito-urinary medicine and sexual and reproductive health services will be excluded.
Sexual health professionals are deeply concerned by the impact that the absence of a national tariff may have on the provision of sexual health services. There are a number of providers of sexual and reproductive health services in the community and many are funded by a payment-by-results tariff system, commissioned by PCTs. The Bill as it is now drafted makes it very unclear how those services can expect to be commissioned by local authorities. Without a national tariff, the expectation at best would be to have a local tariff implemented, based on a national tariff. At worst, providers will return to a system of block contracts.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 292ZA, the question that Clauses 119 and 120 stand part, and Amendment 294M. I shall principally speak to Amendment 292ZA, which is designed to make sure that the national tariff recognises the varying costs associated with people who have experienced homelessness or have complex needs in respect of the full range of healthcare services.
The Bill commits Monitor to publishing a national tariff for services which are or may be provided for the purposes of the NHS. Within this, the Bill makes provision for this tariff to be varied to reflect certain circumstances in which it is provided. However, homeless charities believe that the Bill needs to go further and make provision for tariffs to be varied to reflect the level of complexity and disadvantage experienced by certain patient groups. People who have complex health needs can cost more to treat. Unless the tariff structure reflects this, there is a real danger that services will not wish to treat those patients for whom health outcomes can be harder to achieve—such as homeless people.
Why should this not be reflected in the Bill? There is evidence that health services can already be reluctant to work with homeless people because of the higher costs of treating them. Unless the higher costs of treating some patient groups are taken into account, there is a real danger that the new tariff system may discriminate against homeless people and others with complex needs. In the long term, this will also incur a far higher cost to the NHS and other public services. Failure to treat disadvantaged patients at a primary care level can result in higher rates of hospital admissions, greater demands on acute care and the wider costs of ongoing poor health such as worklessness.
Homeless people have some of the poorest health in our communities. People experiencing acute disadvantage can have complex health needs. As the Department of Health’s Inclusion Health report stated, in order to meet the complex health needs of socially excluded groups, we need,
“a sophisticated, coordinated and flexible response from services. The costs of failure are great not only to the individual life chances of socially excluded clients, but also to the taxpayer, services and the communities who pick up the pieces”.
Unfortunately, many mainstream services do not offer this and as a result are not accessible to disadvantaged patient groups.
Currently, some specialist homeless or vulnerable person’s health services have negotiated their own tariff system so that they are not unduly penalised for treating complex patients. However, this can be difficult to negotiate and such services are not widespread. Unless there is provision for this and the new tariff system takes the wider factors that affect disadvantaged patients into account, services may be disincentivised from treating them. This will lead to poorer health outcomes and make it harder for the NHS to achieve a reduction in health inequalities.
My amendment builds on the commitment to improve the health of the poorest the fastest. The intention to reduce health inequalities through the reform of the NHS has been embedded in the reform process from the first White Paper in 2010. It was revisited by the NHS Future Forum, which flagged up a number of concerns about incentives against cherry-picking at the expense of more complex and expensive patients. In their response, the Government said that services,
“will be covered by a system of prices that accurately reflect clinical complexity”.
My amendment would help to achieve that.
Amendment 292ZB is simply designed to make sure that when Monitor sets prices, and consults on whether to vary prices, it takes into account its duty to promote integration. That is the reason for the reference to Section 13M of the National Health Service Act 2006 and clinical commissioning groups’ duties under Section 14Y of that Act.
On the question that Clauses 119 and 120 stand part, these were referred to in my speech at the beginning of the day—that now seems a long way away. This relates to the reference to the Competition Commission under Clauses 119 and 120. This is also to do with the reference to the method of reaching a price under the national tariff. The Minister dealt earlier with the issue of why an independent body had been chosen for that purpose but it could equally well be the OFT, which I believe would be less provocative and probably more apposite. That was certainly the view of my noble friend Lady Williams when she spoke to her amendment, and I very much hope that the Minister and the department will revisit that issue and see whether it is possible for the OFT to be the body that actually looks at the method of setting tariffs in those circumstances where there is disagreement. That would be a lot less provocative and less liable to introduce EU competition law, along with all the other matters that are involved.
I do not currently have Amendment 294M to hand, sadly, but no doubt I will shortly if I keep talking for slightly longer. It ensures that all providers licensed under chapter 3 and operating in relevant clinical commissioning groups are paid the same price for the provision of services. This is designed entirely to make sure that there is a level playing field within clinical commissioning groups’ areas. I hope that it is the intention in the setting of national tariffs that they will be uniform and there will be no difference in tariff paid by one provider versus another within the same CCG area. With that, I think that I have completed all the amendments that I intended to speak to.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I am tempted to say, “Follow that”; I certainly cannot. The reason why my Amendment 294BZA in this group is a probing amendment is that the wording in Clause 117(1)(a) talks about the,
“differences in the costs incurred in providing health care services for the purposes of the NHS to persons of different descriptions”.
It seemed to be extremely elegant and important to have in the Bill a recognition of the wide variation in both physiology and pathology that different people will present with and that that should determine the tariff itself, not simply be part of the consultation.
I hope that the Minister will be able to provide some assurance that findings from the consultation may indeed provide the range. Is it correct that additional support to secure continued access to services could come through commissioners and providers or, if they cannot reach agreement, for providers alone to be able to apply to Monitor for a modification of the price determined in accordance with the national tariff? Is it correct that Monitor would have the ability to approve and/or set the level of the modification under certain circumstances, using a methodology agreed between Monitor and the NHS Commissioning Board, if a provider could not, at the tariff price, cover its cost with an efficient service? One of the difficulties that keep emerging as we discuss tariffs is the complexity of applying them in the enormously wide variety of clinical situations that will be dealt with across the whole of the health services.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I shall speak to—I had better read this out; I cannot possibly remember it—Amendment 294AZB in my name. This is a probing amendment, intended to smoke out the Government’s real feelings about price competition in the health service market. There have been some conflicting signals on this, as we all know, with the general expectation that the Government intended to introduce a greater measure of price competition, and then a spectacular U-turn earlier this year, which the Government said was not a U-turn because they never intended to introduce price competition anyway. A whole lot of clauses were introduced into the Bill that had the effect of banning price competition in the NHS.
I was assured by the Minister only yesterday that the Government’s true thinking on this is best set out in the document Protecting and Promoting Patients’ Interests, and I am grateful to his officials for giving me a copy. I shall quote what it says on this subject in paragraph 35 under the heading “No price competition”, which sounds very decisive:
“We have strengthened the Bill to ensure that where a national or local tariff is in place, providers and commissioners cannot undercut this”.
That seems to be straightforward, coherent and, as I shall argue, completely wrong. Paragraph 36 says:
“Where competitive tendering is undertaken for services not covered by the tariff, bids would be evaluated in terms of best value (i.e. awarding contracts to those bidders who provide the best balance of quality and cost”.
That seems to be incoherent and complete rubbish. Once you introduce the idea of a balance of quality and cost, you are into price competition. Every time you buy a car, you compare the quality and price of the cars on the market and come to a balance between quality and cost. Every time you go for a coffee and you choose between Costa and—what is the other one?—Starbucks, you are striking a balance between quality and cost. That is clearly incoherent and the result of very sloppy thinking.
Let us assume that that is just bad exposition or bad thinking on the part of the Government, and their real conviction is represented by the first quotation—they do not believe in price competition at all. Why is that a mistake? For two reasons: first, it involves a considerable potential loss of money from public funds. Surely if you can save money with no detriment to the purposes of the health service or the interests of patients, it should be the obligation of the Government to do that.
The second reason is a little more complicated: if you deny price competition a role in the system at all, you are denying the use of the mechanism for price determination. Competition is the only way in which you can really make sure that you understand how prices are put together. If you have a tariff that does not involve any price competition, you are basically into a form of cost-plus price determination, and anyone who knows anything about this—I know a little, having been Minister for Defence Procurement; sometimes we have to use cost-based pricing because there is no competition in the product that we need to acquire—knows that if you produce prices on that basis, you find that you can never exert any downward pressure on the prices that your suppliers are quoting to you. They will put in whatever they think is necessary for that activity and whatever costs they think they ought to put in. They will use the technique that they traditionally prefer to use for producing the goods or services that you are buying. You will never be able to second-guess that or look beyond it. It is an extraordinarily wasteful system of procurement and it is completely wrong.
We should have a commonsensical agreement that we should use price competition wherever we can where it does not do damage to other desirable objectives, particularly the objective of patient outcomes. I have endeavoured to produce an amendment—it is a purely probing amendment; I am sure that it is technically deficient, and I do not intend to take it any further in its present form—that establishes one way of doing that. It says that when commissioners wish to use price competition and they find that they get an offer of a price that is more favourable than the tariff price, they should be allowed to take it, subject to checking with Monitor to ensure that there is no damage to other purposes of the health service, to the interests of patients or to the structure and capacity of the health service. In health, there are often good reasons why you might not want to take the nearest offer, and I shall come to a couple of those in a moment, but, where there are no such reasons, surely the onus should be that you should take that offer and save the public money.
There are reasons why in health it may not always be sensible or in the interests of the health service or of patients to take the lowest offer, and I entirely accept that that may often arise. One is in the case where you are making a strategic investment in a new capability. We have had examples that have struck me in the course of these debates—for example, the new stroke systems in London and cardiac systems that cover London. I do not come from London but I believe that they have been a great success. That has consisted of ensuring that a quasi-monopoly has been given to perhaps half a dozen units that contain the best expertise and the best equipment that can be brought together for these purposes. That has been found to be the best solution for maximising patient outcomes or, to put it rather more straightforwardly, actually saving people’s lives, which is clearly the priority. I totally accept that there may be decisions of that kind that need to be taken irrespective of cost. Indeed, I welcome that they should be taken irrespective of cost and I have provided in this amendment a mechanism for making clear that when that happens and there are arguments of that kind they can prevail and it can be quite clear and quite transparent why the decision has been taken.
The second reason is also rather specific to healthcare, although not exclusively so. One of the features of the economics of healthcare is that it has a very high operational gearing; in other words, a very high ratio of fixed costs to total costs. In any sector of the market where that prevails there is obviously a great temptation for people to bid opportunistically when they have spare capacity at a price that represents a return over their variable costs and some contribution to fixed costs though not necessarily a very great one. You may get some very cheap offers coming in from people who happen to have spare capacity at a particular moment. It may be dangerous to take those offers rather than ones from other suppliers, such as traditional NHS suppliers which are more expensive, because if you do that you will put those NHS suppliers out of business. By definition, if people are bidding at a price below their full costs but over their variable costs then they will not always be providing it on that basis. They will certainly not be investing in new capability or sustaining capability on that basis. One has to be very careful about predatory pricing in the health service. I totally recognise that, and it would be a very good reason for saying, “We do not want to take this particular offer because if we do we shall put out of business capacity we need over the long term that can only be sustained long term at a higher price”.
I am very open and sensitive to the reasons for not taking the lowest price in many individual cases, but it seems to me that the Government have got this thing completely the wrong way round. The default option should be to take the cheapest price. We should be saving money. We should be exerting downward pressure on cost. We should be encouraging people to come up with new, cheaper and more efficient ways of doing things consistent with the quality that we require. It goes without saying that quality should be absolute and should be determined for every diagnostic related group, every service and health service procedure. For each of these we should have a clearly defined specification of quality and we should not go below that for reasons of price. Where we can get that quality cheaper and we do not do structural damage to the service it seems to me completely crazy not to go in that direction. I am sorry that the Government carried out the U-turn in February and I hope they may now turn back again.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I have some sympathy with some of the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Davies of Stamford in the sense that a blanket ban on price competition seems rather misguided in the situation the NHS faces. To give one example, under the last Government the price we paid for spot purchasing from the private sector when there were peaks of demand in the NHS was often much cheaper than had previously been the case and could, on occasion, be below a tariff price for some of the services. That was in the interests of the NHS and patients. A blanket ban does not seem to me to be the most sensible way forward.
I want to speak to Amendment 291C which should have been in this group. Assiduous readers of the groupings list will see that there are two commas after Amendment 291B. Between those two commas should have been Amendment 291C and the Whips’ Office has confirmed to me that was indeed the intention, so I wish to speak to the missing amendment and I also wish to speak to Amendments 294AA and 294BA which were included in the list.
Amendment 291C adds to Clause 141 some principles that should be applied to the construction of the national tariff. We have already had one debate about the tariff and how the national Commissioning Board might be encouraged to move the tariff away from its dependence on pricing episodes of care, which tend to favour acute hospitals, to a greater emphasis on periods of care that are more appropriate to the high volume of NHS patients with long-term conditions. I withdrew my earlier amendments on this issue but discussed the issue much further with outside interests and experts to see whether there was anything we could usefully do to further this particular cause. I think the Minister was not unsympathetic to some of the ideas in the earlier amendment.
These discussions have persuaded me that there is widespread support for trying to move the tariff currencies and pricing in the direction of periods of care but also a belief that this will take quite a long time and it involves a good deal of new data collection and analysis. In the mean time, people seemed to be saying that there was some merit in being clear about what should be the underpinning key principles for developing the national tariff in the future. I have had a shot at encapsulating these key principles—drawing very much on work by the NHS Confederation and I am extremely grateful for the help and advice it gave me—so that principles of this kind could be placed in the Bill to guide those who will be taking forward the difficult but important work of shaping the national tariff. I hope the Minister will be able to agree that we should try to have some guiding principles on the tariff in the Bill even if he does not like my particular wording because this is an important issue. We need to use this legislation to try to shape an important piece of work that will stretch over quite a few years to develop a new national tariff.
Amendments 294AA and 294BAA are technical amendments that reflect concerns expressed to my noble friend Lord Darzi and me by representatives of specialist medical interests about the current wording in Clause 116 on consultation on proposals for the national tariff and Clause 128 on the responses to those consultations. Amendment 294AA is intended to ensure that the relevant specialist groups are consulted on proposals for the tariff. It does not seek to specify the particular groups—that would be left to Monitor in the light of what the particular proposals were, affecting particular specialties. The amendment simply seeks to require that specialist clinical groups are consulted when tariff proposals are made so that they are involved and can bring to bear their expertise on the tariff-setting processes that can be involved with particular quite highly specialised sets of services. Amendment 294BAA merely seeks to ensure that when there are objections to a tariff proposal, assessing the weight of opinion for or against should be restricted to specialist licence holders undertaking work of comparable complexity. This is really to ensure that any objections are raised by the people undertaking work of a similar complexity defined in the original proposals for tariffs. I know that specialist opinion will be much reassured if the Minister could look favourably on these two amendments.
Baroness Murphy
My Lords, I would like to make a few remarks about tariff and price setting and echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, who reminded us that there are two equally important mechanisms: tariff development, which is the responsibility of the national Commissioning Board; and price setting, which is the responsibility of Monitor. It is critical that Monitor retains the responsibility to set prices. That enables it to uphold its responsibilities for sustainability and balance the interests of commissioners and providers in the patients’ best interest. Independence in price setting is utterly critical. We have seen previously that not having independence from the executive arm in the NHS has been a disadvantage in getting the right prices which reflect the complexity of the issue concerned. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that the development of tariffs is a very complex matter. It is work in progress but the work never stops. That has been the case in all countries that have developed tariffs and will be for the foreseeable future. We need flexibility when designing tariffs.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that we have seen how catastrophic simple price competition has been internationally in driving down quality of service. Indeed, we have seen that in this country, too. Price competition was not helpful. In order to drive down prices and get better value, you need to start designing the tariff around best practice. This was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. You need to design a pathway of care based on what should ideally happen to a patient, deliver the clinical pathway, cost that out and get the best practice in place. If that amounts to less than the set price, which it often does, that is the way that you can start to drive down costs while improving quality. A tremendous amount of superb work has been done in a group of mental health trusts looking at best practice tariffs for episodes of care. If we can get that work ongoing in a group of people who are dedicated to designing better tariffs, we will be able to improve price competition by designing the tariff correctly while not striving to be competitive on price alone.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. I made clear in my remarks that I believe one should start by specifying quality—that would include her point about best practice—and then allow the market to bid against that. Where potential suppliers, whether NHS or otherwise, can come in below the existing price—call it the tariff price or what you will—that will be a spur to everybody else to consider whether they can deliver that quality—I stress “that quality”—better, more effectively and more cheaply. That mechanism will be totally absent in the National Health Service if the Bill is not changed in the way that I have suggested or something equivalent.
Baroness Murphy
I take the noble Lord’s point. I think it is possible to introduce the mechanisms that he would like to see through the existing mechanisms in the Bill on tariff design. Those mechanisms would also address the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, about the need to develop an additional payment for certain kinds of innovation tariff. The possibilities for designing tariffs are wide. We do not need to be rigid about this. I do not know how much needs to be written on the face of the Bill. It seems to me that we need to get that separate in our minds from the actual price setting which is more the role of the independent regulator, having got the design of the tariff correct. Therefore, I would like to see Monitor retain its role as a price setting regulator but I wholeheartedly agree that a lot of creative work needs to be done on the tariff to get it right for integrated care packages and proper best practice design.
Baroness Hollins
My Lords, I would like to add to what my noble friend Lady Murphy has said by commenting on a couple of amendments in this group which concern the need for the tariff to be able to reflect and adapt to the requirements of people with complex needs. I am thinking particularly about people with learning disabilities who may need additional time to be devoted to them because of their conceptual or communication difficulties, or other disabled people who may require reasonable adjustments to be made in order for them to use a service. I think also of people with mental health problems using hospital services such as maternity services. The provision of maternity care is hugely complicated by the presence of people with an enduring mental illness. The need for the tariff accurately to reflect and encompass these needs poses quite a challenge.
Baroness Tonge
My Lords, I rise to ask a question rather than to make comments. I am rather confused about how tariffs work. I am thinking particularly of sexual and reproductive health services. Therefore, I support Amendment 292A tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Gould.
Sexual and reproductive health services are currently provided by general practitioners and clinics directly commissioned by primary care trusts. They can be family planning clinics, youth counselling clinics or genitourinary medicine clinics. Under the new system, GPs will presumably carry on providing sexual and reproductive health services and abortion counselling services, although I am unclear exactly how they will be remunerated in the future. Those GP services are very variable. Some GPs provide a superb service while others provide a very bad one. Some do not provide certain services at all so it is common for patients to go to clinics in their area which have been provided by the primary care trust.
Under the new health service, local authorities will commission and provide sexual and reproductive health services and abortion counselling services as well as HIV prevention services, but not the treatment, although I do not want to go into that now. They will be responsible for those sexual and reproductive health services. However, I am puzzled by the following matter. Currently, if a patient does not like their GP or finds that the GP does not provide the service they want, they can go to a local clinic. However, because of political or religious arguments within a local authority it may have made those services a very low priority, or perhaps does not provide them at all. It seems to me that there is nothing to compel local authorities to provide certain public health services. If a patient cannot get the relevant services from a GP or does not like them, and cannot go a local clinic because one is not available, can they go to a clinic in another local authority where they are not resident? This could be a problem for many patients all over the country, particularly young people who tend to go to different areas for their services where perhaps they are not known or the doctor does not know them. So I am very concerned.
Could the Minister please say how these services will be affected if no national tariff is set on public health services? How do we know that local authorities will not only provide services for sexual and reproductive health but accept people from other local authorities for treatment? It is a very important question for many people in this country.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I think that this debate has clearly demonstrated the importance of having a robust pricing system in the NHS. At a minimum, it must deliver sustainable reimbursement for efficient providers and promote value for taxpayers’ money. In addition, it must support the role of commissioners in securing continuous improvement for patients by strengthening incentives for providers to improve quality and efficiency.
Perhaps I could address one aspect of the opening speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. She spoke rather disparagingly, I thought, about the Secretary of State palming issues off on to quangos. Listening to the noble Baroness, the Committee may get the impression that it is this Government who have created quangos for the first time. I make no apology for being part of a Government who believe that arm’s-length bodies can play a very valuable role in public services, especially when given the autonomy to deliver those services free of political micromanagement. The Government also believe that the number of such bodies has grown over recent years to an unsustainable level, and that is why the Bill abolishes a large number of them. So I gently urge the noble Baroness to stop complaining quite so much about quangos and remind herself that she was part of a Government who created a very large array of such bodies.
I begin by addressing the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness which proposes a delegated power for the Secretary of State to make regulations on commissioners regarding a duty as to continuous improvement. I am sure that we all agree with much of the apparent intention behind this amendment, first, that commissioners should act with a view to securing continuous improvement in the provision of services in terms of both quality and efficiency, and indeed in reducing inequalities; that is fundamental to their role. The second intention is that there is a role for regulations in ensuring that commissioning processes operate as means to this end; in other words, that tools such as service reviews, procurement and competition are used transparently and effectively to secure continuous improvement in the provision of services in the interests of patients. Our proposal is that such regulations would be made under Clause 71. They could be updated from time to time, subject to parliamentary resolution. While we would not disagree with some of the suggestions proposed under Amendment 277B—which, I recognise, has been carefully crafted—it may be a bit too detailed for the face of the Bill. In any event, we would want to consult publicly on these matters before putting firm proposals before Parliament.
The role of the pricing system is to underpin and enable continuous improvement—for example, by strengthening incentives for providers to adopt best-practice models of care, in line with commissioning priorities. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, was quite right in all that she said on that point. Furthermore, the payment by results programme, introduced by the previous Government, has gone a long way to strengthening pricing within the NHS. It has ensured that reimbursement better reflects the volume and complexity of patients treated, and it has helped to reduce transaction costs. However, a number of problems have been identified with this system over the last few years, including by the previous Administration. These problems have not yet been fully addressed, and we want to do so.
The problems are as follows. The methodology for setting prices is not transparent for either commissioners or providers. That makes the system unpredictable, and there is evidence of significant variations in the tariff from year to year. That undermines investment and innovation.
Baroness Gould of Potternewton
The difference between sexual health and most of public health is that sexual health provision crosses local government boundaries, otherwise you will restrict any form of open access, which is absolutely essential in providing proper and effective treatment and care for people who need sexual health services. That has to be taken into account. Identifying sexual health provision just in terms of local government areas will make all the work that has been carried out over the past few years to provide better services disappear rapidly.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I appreciate those points and I was coming to some words of comfort for the noble Baroness. Not only could Monitor provide technical advice to Public Health England, provided that that was resourced and managed through the framework agreements and the memorandum of understanding between the two organisations, which would be a given, but Public Health England and local authorities could develop their own tariff, if that is what they wanted to do. I understand the noble Baroness’s concern about the underfunding of sexual health services and that the mandate may not set out enough on that score. Her amendment is clearly a way of ensuring that public health services—particularly this type of service—have an agreed cost attached to them that cannot be varied by local authorities, unless they adhere to the rules around variation. I understand all that. However, what the noble Baroness proposes would significantly increase the remit of Monitor and the NHS Commissioning Board and cut across the roles of local authorities and Public Health England. I will, of course, reflect on what she said, but there are probably mechanisms to deliver the kinds of objectives that she is aiming for.
Also on the subject of sexual health services, my noble friend Lady Tonge made some important points. I completely agree with the importance of the issue she raised. It would probably be best if she allowed me to write to her in response.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones proposed in his Amendment 292ZA that Monitor should include variations to prices for individuals who experience disadvantage or who have complex needs. While I am sympathetic to his intention, this is already provided for in the broad provisions in Clauses 114(4) and 117(1). In addition, the inclusion of “must” rather than “may” would not provide Monitor with flexibility on when to specify variations and rules.
I move on to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, who argued the case for competition on price, and I listened with interest to what he had to say. Let me explain what we are seeking to achieve. Overall, we want a system of fixed prices, set locally or nationally, that would ensure that competition was based on quality and patient choice, not on price. Only in specific circumstances could the prices determined by the tariff be varied. These flexibilities would not allow price competition but would rather, as I have indicated, prevent cherry-picking, allow innovation and secure continued access to services. Put simply, the flexibilities would be allowed only where the effect was to improve the efficiency or quality of services provided.
The Government made amendments to the Bill in another place to make clear that the tariff would not be a maximum price. That is vital to avoid perverse incentives for providers to cut costs at the expense of quality. That is entirely different from the competitive tendering scenario to which the noble Lord, Lord Davies, referred. In that scenario, whereby services would be outside the tariff, it is quite reasonable to evaluate bids in terms of best value, not the cheapest price. Guidance published by the previous Government made that clear. I think that we are closer together than perhaps the noble Lord appreciates, but I am grateful to him for what he said. However, he will know that it was the firm view of the NHS Future Forum that competition should be based essentially on quality rather than on price alone. There is of course a danger that we have a race to the bottom if we go too far down that road.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones in his Amendment 294M made some telling points. While I am sympathetic to some of them, I can reassure him that agreements for local modification of tariff prices under Clause 122 are intended not to introduce price competition but to sustain the provision of essential services. For example, a local modification may be necessary to sustain provision of A&E or maternity services in a less populated area. It would be inappropriate to remunerate all providers of an essential service at a modified tariff rate without assessing their circumstances on an individual basis.
The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in her Amendment 294BZA proposed that it be explicit that Monitor, in establishing the national tariff, have regard to differences in costs of patients incurred by providers and differences between services provided. Clause 116 makes clear that when developing the draft tariff for consultation, both the NHS Commissioning Board and Monitor should have regard to the differences in costs of patients incurred by providers and differences between services provided. However, that amendment raises a valid point around whether Monitor should have regard to these differences when publishing, as well as when drawing up, the national tariff. I can tell the noble Baroness that this issue will be given consideration to determine whether further clarity is necessary in this area.
I now return to Amendment 292ZA, tabled by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. He raised the issue of cherry-picking, which we define as something that occurs when providers undertake only the more simple interventions for less complex patients but are paid an inflated price, based on higher average costs. I hope that my noble friend would agree with that definition. Under the proposals in the Bill, Monitor would ensure that the price paid to providers was accurate and reflective of the services delivered. A comprehensive tariff with more reflective prices will prevent cherry-picking. In particular, Monitor and the board would need to consider among other factors the impact of variations in the range of services provided by different providers and the differing needs of the patients treated. My noble friend again asked why the Competition Commission should be used, and again my answer is similar to the one I gave him earlier. The commission is an expert independent body with experience in considering matters such as this—unlike the OFT.
I now turn to Amendment 294AA, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. It would duplicate what is already stated in this clause, whereby Monitor must send a notice to other persons as it considers appropriate, which may include other clinical groups. Clause 59(8) makes explicit that Monitor must obtain appropriate clinical advice to enable it effectively to discharge its functions. Clause 116(1)(c) provides that Monitor must notify other appropriate persons of the proposed national tariff, which may include other clinical groups. Monitor must publish its consultation containing the draft tariff.
As regards Amendment 294BA, the share of supply percentage that triggers a reference to the Competition Commission will be considered in secondary legislation and agreed through the affirmative resolution procedure. The share of supply percentage would ensure that providers of a service made up of only a few providers would still be able to object to a proposed national tariff and therefore trigger a reference for independent adjudication.
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I do not want to stand between noble Lords and their dinner—and indeed, on this side of the House, yet more defrosting. I would like to be able to say that the Minister had given us some comfort in this debate, as he has in one or two of the others, but I am not sure that that is the case.
I did not moan about a quango. I have mentioned only two quangos today, but they are rather large and important ones. One of them will have a budget of £20 billion, and the whole House has agreed that it is concerned that accountability to the Secretary of State for those quangos is right. We have not quite settled that and have returned to that issue consistently, almost every day throughout discussion on the Bill, but that probably now needs to be left until the new year.
I support my noble friend Lady Gould and the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge. The funding of sexual health services is one of those cases which will have potentially disastrous unintended consequences—in more ways than one, if one may put it that way. My noble friend is right to raise that, and we will support her fully if she decides that she wants to take it to the next stage of the Bill.
As ever, my noble friend Lord Davies gave an original flavour to the debate and raised some important and pertinent questions. I will read more carefully the Minister's answers. Ditto to my noble friend Lord Warner, whose amendments are very important. What underlaid what my noble friend Lord Warner and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-James, said, was that this is not a quick job. This will take a long time and it is important that we get it right. We are not convinced that the national Commissioning Board and Monitor together will not create a very bureaucratic, slow way to set the tariff. We are not convinced that that is the way forward. We need to consider an independent voice and some other way to do that. We will probably continue that discussion at another time, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Transport for London Bill [HL]
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Grey-Thompson
My Lords, I have an interest to declare in that I am a paid board member of Transport for London, or TfL, which is a public body constituted under the Greater London Authority Act 1999.
This is a Private Bill that was promoted by Transport for London, deposited on 26 November 2010 and ordered to commence in the House of Lords. The Bill was read for the first time on 24 January 2011. Its purpose is to provide Transport for London with a broader set of financial and disposal powers to meet its business needs more flexibly and to allow it to deliver better value for money for the farepaying and taxpaying public.
Specifically, Clause 4 will remove the requirement for the Secretary of State’s consent to the disposal of surplus land from Section 163 of the GLA Act, as that consent imposes an unnecessary restriction on TfL, given that the Mayor of London is required to provide an opinion in advance of sale that the land to be sold is surplus to the requirements of TfL in conducting its functions. Clause 4 will reduce uncertainty for TfL when selling land, while maintaining the Mayor's opinion’s statutory safeguard that the land to be sold is surplus to requirements.
One petition was deposited against the Bill by the West London Line Group. The petition primarily concerns Clause 4. TfL has entered a dialogue, having met the petitioners' representative, and is hopeful of reaching an agreed position with the petitioner, rather than an opposed Bill Committee being required.
At present, TfL and TfL subsidiaries are not permitted by law to grant security, such as a mortgage, over their assets and revenue streams. That reduces TfL's capacity to finance projects and functions at the best available interest rate or at the lowest risk. That extra cost or risk is ultimately borne by farepayers and taxpayers through higher costs or greater risks on TfL.
Clause 5 will allow TfL subsidiaries to borrow and charge against assets and revenue streams. This will provide TfL with cheaper finance for its projects and more flexibility in how it borrows. Under secured borrowing, TfL subsidiaries can achieve lower interest rates than can be attained through the Public Works Loan Board or issuing bonds—two of the significant debt financing options for TfL now. TfL subsidiaries can also borrow for a discrete purpose, and the security can be structured so that a creditor has recourse only against the subsidiary borrowing, but no recourse against TfL and other TfL subsidiaries. That can better protect the farepaying and taxpaying public from liability for TfL debts.
Clause 5 also allows TfL to purchase subsidiary companies with secured debt. TfL would not be required to restructure secured debt once Clause 5 is operating, as was the case with the purchase of Tube Lines Ltd and Tube Lines (Finance) plc. Had this been operating at the time of those acquisitions, it would have spared TfL significant costs at the time of purchase—ultimately borne by farepayers and taxpayers. Importantly, existing TfL creditor rights are reserved in full by the Bill. Also, TfL subsidiary borrowing under Clause 5 will be subject to existing borrowing limits set by the Secretary of State as applied to TfL, operating as an effective limit on the new power.
Clause 6 will allow TfL to form or join others in forming limited partnerships. TfL would like to be able to use a partnership structure to seek third-party investors in its property estate and to manage secondary income generated from that investment. Pension funds are identified as likely investors who often prefer limited partnerships to other legal structures in which to invest. A partnership structure can better attract long-term investors to property development, because partnerships are tax-transparent.
There is very limited tax benefit to TfL from using a limited partnership vehicle, as Clause 6 provides that a TfL subsidiary company will bear the incidence of the tax liability generated by the partnership, as a subsidiary company is not exempt from income, corporation or capital gains tax. The exemption to that relates to stamp duty, where TfL will be subject only to a proportionate share, should any charges relating to stamp duty arise.
At present, TfL is limited to exercising its functions only through a company limited by shares. Clause 7 expands the list of legal structures through which TfL functions can be undertaken to include a company limited by guarantee, a limited liability partnership or a limited partnership. This will allow TfL to conduct its functions more flexibly and better enable TfL to seek third party investors in its property estate.
Clause 8 amends TfL’s hedging powers and responds to changes in the way that financial institutions hedge risk away from specific commodity trading to trading by indices. It also expressly permits TfL to hedge risks that impact the rate of contributions that TfL is required to make to the TfL pension fund, including for membership longevity. It also responds to the evolution of the financial markets.
In summary, the Bill will assist TfL in seeking the most cost-effective borrowing. It also allows TfL to mitigate the risk that applies to its pension contribution liabilities through improving the hedging power. The Bill will assist TfL to maximise income from and investment in its assets and allow TfL to deliver better value for money for fare payers and taxpayers. I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I welcome the Bill. I think that TfL generally, since its creation, has been a success under both its mayors, and it has certainly improved the general transport in London. Therefore, I congratulate the noble Baroness on achieving a Second Reading for it, which is often quite difficult in this House. I have one concern about Clause 4, which I have already informed the noble Baroness about. Whereas most of the Bill is to do with the financial issues for TfL, which is very useful, TfL has managed to slip in a little clause about selling off land, which one might suggest is necessary to help finance some of the new projects. There is nothing wrong with that.
However, my concern is that TfL needs to take a long-term view on the land that it holds and might need in the future. Experience to date is that it is very difficult to forecast with any certainty what land transport, and in particular railways, might need in the future. One recalls Dr Beeching’s slashing of lines—closing them down over the years because everyone was going to go by car, and how wonderful that was going to be. Now, of course, everyone is struggling to reopen lines. There was a very welcome announcement last week in the autumn Statement about reopening the Oxford to Cambridge line. The problem is that it goes from Oxford as far as Bedford and no further, because the land was sold off for building probably 20 years ago, and there is a problem—somewhere near Bedford, I think—where the line should have gone across a boating lake. Whatever one thought of Dr Beeching, no one thought that there would be such a demand for new rail transport in the future.
I had an issue about 15 years ago with the then British Rail Property Board, encouraged by the Department of Transport, over a freight terminal. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. There was a lovely piece of land in Battersea that was ideal for building a concrete batching plant. All the materials could come in by rail and then be distributed locally as concrete to the local buildings. However, there was a competition between the concrete company and Battersea dogs home to have this piece of land because the dogs needed more land for exercise. I made the point to anyone who would listen that dogs do not need to be rail-connected, whereas it is quite useful for concrete work to be rail-connected. No one thought it was particularly funny and Battersea dogs home won, probably with lots of extra traffic on the road.
My message is that it is very difficult to forecast what bits of land might be needed for what in the future. We can talk about station extensions, but we know that no one wants to build extra stations or extra platforms because the services work fine at the moment, except when one suddenly discovers that one cannot lengthen the platforms any more or that one needs to lengthen them or put an extra platform in because of the demand. Then one needs land. Extra land might be needed for the maintenance of new bits of rolling stock or small rail freight terminals around London. The problem is that once these bits of land are sold off, it is almost impossible to get them back again at any reasonable price. Compulsory purchase is a very long and tortuous thing and no one likes doing it. Basically, one is always told, “Can’t you go somewhere else?”.
I suppose I do not trust anyone to have a long-term policy to hold on to land. That comment applies to what remains of the British Rail Property Board before it gets subsumed into the Department for Transport, to the department itself, and to Transport for London. They all do it with the best of intentions, but my issue with Clause 4 is that whether one trusts everyone or no one, it is useful not to have the beneficiary of a sale being the organisation that organises the sale. In this case, the beneficiary is clearly TfL.
I would like to see some wording in the clause—and I am very happy to discuss it with the noble Baroness and Ministers in the future—that retains the requirement to get permission from the Department for Transport, which presumably would not have an interest in the land, for such a sale. I would feel comforted that as much protection as possible had been given to these pieces of land, which are necessarily near railways. If they are miles from a railway line, it probably does not matter very much, unless one is going to talk about river transport, and I have not looked at the land holdings for that. That is the kind of wording that I would like in Clause 4, and I look forward to discussing it with the noble Baroness in the next few days.
Baroness Kramer
My Lords, I am not sure whether it is an interest because it is a former one, but I am a former member of the board of Transport for London and have an ongoing interest in transport within London which, like most Members of the House, I use extensively. I rise not in opposition to the Bill but to raise issues and questions that could use exploring. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has raised one of the central issues of the Bill, which is whether an outsider—someone other than Transport for London—should be engaged in the authorisation of the sell-off of operational land, particularly if it has implications for overland railway in contrast to simply the tube, bus and tram services that we most often associate with TfL itself.
In the spirit of the Localism Bill, as well as prudent practice, I would rather see the Greater London Assembly, which has an expert transport scrutiny committee, taking on that kind of responsibility rather than the Secretary of State. Understanding the implications of changing the use of land in London requires a real awareness of the intricacies and complexities of the city. I think that the Secretary of State, sitting up at that distant central government level, has relatively little understanding of the detailed dynamics of London. It is within the Greater London Assembly that that range of experience is present in people who understand what may be housing issues, dealing with waste management, transport issues, the whole range of elements that impact on decisions about land use in London. That would be the more appropriate body.
As the Greater London Assembly is not under the control of the mayor, which is evident from the institutional structures, it can provide independent scrutiny just as effectively, if not more effectively, than the Secretary of State. I raise that as a significant element. Transport for London is, after all, the transport arrangement for one particular city and it is certainly not a national transport arrangement, so detaching the Secretary of State from such an entity has a great deal of logic to it in the spirit of the Localism Bill, which we have recently taken through this House.
I raise one other set of issues—again, not in opposition. There is interesting language in the Bill on the securitisation of revenue streams from assets. I understand from earlier discussions—I have a letter here from Transport for London that goes into a little detail on it—that the concept behind this is that Transport for London owns property that it happens to rent out, as it sometimes does when it holds property for a period of time but which it believes it will need at some point in the future for a transport project. Alternatively, it has land that is used for parking, perhaps on a temporary basis, and again that land is set aside for some future transport purpose but can generate revenue in the mean time, or it may just have parking land because that is the only way it feels it can safeguard parking that is necessary for various transport facilities. Those revenues could be securitised as a mechanism for creating efficient borrowing. To me, that makes eminent sense.
It seems to me that this language also covers quite comfortably the notion of securitising the fare box. Revenues from the fare box seem to fall within the definitions in the Bill, and I support that. It is an important step forward in providing Transport for London and London itself with the mechanism that is needed to continue building our infrastructure. However, I should be interested in understanding whether that is the perception of Transport for London or indeed the perception of the Government. If so, that makes the Bill increasingly interesting.
None of the other issues covered here, such as the ability to do sensible kinds of hedging or to form partnerships with somewhat more flexibility in the current environment, seems at all controversial. However, I should be interested in hearing comment and response on the issues that I have raised.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on her introduction to the Bill. In a lucid contribution she made clear that which for some of us may have been a little opaque and she resolved many of the anxieties that we might have had.
It will be recognised in the House that Transport for London is a greatly envied transport authority. Many other transport authorities in the country would wish to have the existing powers of Transport for London, let alone the minor additions produced by the Bill. Of course, you cannot discuss bus services in our cities and in our countryside without recognising the advantages that Transport for London has had, and continues to have, in providing such services. It goes without saying that I would be even warmer in my thoughts about Transport for London if it were under a different political direction from the one that it enjoys at present. Nevertheless, the point still holds that it is an authority which we hold in high regard.
In passing, I indicate my regret at the role that TfL might have been able to play, if the financial arrangements had been arrived at differently, in guaranteeing that rolling stock for Crossrail would be provided by a company in Britain. However, it apparently lost that battle in the Department for Transport, so the decision is much more likely to follow the regretted Thameslink decision—namely, the company that may well win the contract will be an external company with the carriages and rolling stock being made elsewhere.
However, that is not really germane to the Bill. What is germane to the Bill, and I am very grateful to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness who have spoken thus far, is the critical issue of the disposal of assets. I was at a meeting only the other day with the Enfield authority, which I have always held in high regard—I certainly did when I was a Member of Parliament for the area. The Enfield authority has ambitious schemes to improve transport links in the area. Crucially, rail links are determined by the very thing that my noble friend Lord Berkeley identified—namely, that land held by the railway has been sustained and there is therefore capacity for putting down additional tracks to improve a service when that would not have been the case if the land had been sold. Therefore, we have a real interest in the land held by this public authority, and I hope that reassurances can be given on how such decisions are to be made.
One dimension that has not been mentioned thus far in the debate is that any sale of urban land has an impact on neighbours. It has an impact on the people who may already be using the land as tenants of TfL but it also has an impact on those immediately adjoining the land. I accept that it is difficult to put this within the framework of legislation but I hope it is recognised that TfL has obligations as a public authority to engage in proper consultation locally when the disposal of significant pieces of land occurs.
However, in broad terms we very much welcome this measure and I congratulate the noble Baroness once again on having introduced it so ably.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, on moving her Bill so expertly, and I am grateful for the contributions of other noble Lords. I shall resist the temptation provided by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, to discuss rolling stock purchases.
I do not oppose this Second Reading. However, I should make it clear that the Government also have some reservations about the powers in the Bill as presently drafted. Officials from the Department for Transport are currently in discussion with Transport for London on these provisions and I look forward to a more detailed examination of them in Committee.
Lord Berkeley
As the Bill was, as I understand it, introduced about a year ago, have these discussions been going on continuously for a year? They are taking an awfully long time if that is the case.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, Transport for London is responsible for progressing the Bill. I am just giving some comments on behalf of the Government.
On the subject of the disposal of land and Clause 4 of the draft Bill, which has been one of the principal subjects of this debate, the Government are clear that the protection of strategically important assets must remain a priority. Furthermore, it would appear reasonable for the arrangements in London to parallel those on the national rail network, where there are restrictions analogous to those currently placed on Transport for London. I should also point out that Transport for London already has the power, without prior consent, to lease operational land for less than 50 years and to dispose of land that has not been operational for five years or more. I understand that Transport for London is looking further at this option and I look forward to its revised proposals.
Baroness Grey-Thompson
My Lords, I thank all the noble Lords who have taken part in the debate this evening on what I think everyone will agree is a very technical Bill. It appears that Clause 4 has raised the most interest.
In response to the Minister, TfL is in discussion with the Department for Transport on the drafting of Clause 4. It recognises that the protection of strategically important railway assets must remain a priority. I understand what the Minister said about the scope of the existing Section 163 to dispose of operational land, and I confirm that TfL is looking further at this option and will be in touch with the department in due course to take this forward.
I understand the concern raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on the long-term view that must be taken on the protection of land. TfL wrote to the noble Lord on 20 April 2011, and I reiterate what was said in that letter. TfL is now persuaded of the merit of retaining the requirement for the Secretary of State’s consent in circumstances where Network Rail or the British residuary board is an adjacent landowner or has land in close proximity to the land to be disposed of. TfL is liaising with the Government about Clause 4 to resolve their concerns. I hope that that goes some way to easing the noble Lord’s doubts over the disposal of land, but I would welcome continued discussion on this matter.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, raised the issue of independent scrutiny and Clause 4. I thank her for mentioning the letter that TfL wrote to her. TfL does not feel that it would be appropriate to move to a consent mechanism which is entirely different from the Secretary of State’s consent if it were retained in certain cases. The noble Baroness also mentioned securities. TfL currently has no plans to securitise revenue generated by the Tube. Instead, TfL may use the power to grant security to raise finance from assets generating a secondary revenue scheme, such as car parks and property with a rental income.
TfL subsidiaries may grant security over both physical assets and revenue streams under Clause 5. However, TfL has no plans to do this over key infrastructure such as the Tube. TfL’s expectation is that the power to grant security may be used on car parks or property with a rental income, such as office space and new infrastructure that generate specific income. The noble Baroness also raised the issue of limited partnerships. TfL would like to form limited partnerships so that it can utilise a partnership structure to manage secondary income generated from its property estate; to better attract long-term investors to property development on non-operational land, because partnerships are tax transparent, which can be attractive to particular investors; and to better attract pension funds to invest in these developments as likely sources of investment. I am very glad that the noble Baroness mentioned the pension fund. If members of the TfL pension fund live longer than the actuarial estimate then TfL will have a prospective liability that is not currently accounted for. Hedging that potential risk is one way that TfL can offset that liability if eventuated.
Once again I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate this evening. I have taken all the points on board, and no doubt all the Bill’s provisions will be closely considered in Committee.
Health and Social Care Bill
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Owen
My Lords, I wish to draw attention to Clause 72(1)(b), which refers to,
“a power to investigate on its own initiative whether the National Health Service Commissioning Board or a clinical commissioning group has failed to comply with a requirement imposed by virtue of section 71(1)(c)”—
which we discussed earlier, the provision to,
“not engage in anti-competitive behaviour which is against the interests of people who use such services”.
I had understood that the decision not to have competition as one of the main functions of Monitor was a considered political decision, but the more one looks at Clause 71(1)(c), and now at Clause 72(1)(b), the more one realises that this has been got round, effectively, by ensuring that anti-competitiveness becomes a prime responsibility of Monitor.
There are a number of objections to this. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, put his finger on it, that a good regulator does not also become a policeman in an anti sense to the people he is trying to regulate. There is a deep question as to whether you really want a situation where Monitor can be set against the National Health Service Commissioning Board and the commissioning groups. I am very doubtful that this is a sensible power to give to Monitor.
I know it is regulating the whole group, but if you look at the way Monitor is approaching its tasks, time and again it is going to be reliant on good will and an atmosphere of trust between Monitor, the NHS Commissioning Board and the commissioning groups, and now there is this question of anti-competitiveness. It is not as if nobody else is going to be looking at anti-competitive behaviour of the National Health Service Commissioning Board. The private sector wants to go into this whole area and will be looking very carefully at whether or not it is being given an even playing field. It will be taking, and threatening to take, the Commissioning Board to law—I am not even raising the issue of EU legislation, but just under British legislation.
I do not think it is fair to argue that there is unlimited freedom for the National Health Service Commissioning Board or the commissioning groups to operate in this area, particularly the board. You are really setting yourself up for a very difficult situation. Also, to do it “on its own initiative”—does that mean Monitor would not consult the board or a clinical commissioning group but just suddenly involve itself in an investigation? I would be grateful if the Minister could give some indication of how he sees this in practice.
Will some guidance be given not to develop an adversarial relationship? It is very easy for animosities to start coming in to this area. As I say, it is not as if it is free from legal challenge. Their actions can be challenged. However, for another NHS body to be able to question the judgment of the Commissioning Board that in this particular case it is best not to put something out to competitive tender, or to make a judgment when it has been done because somebody feels that it is anti-competitive, is a really dangerous power. In the wrong circumstances, where Monitor might be chaired by somebody who is getting into a bad relationship with the NHS Commissioning Board chairman, something not totally unknown in these areas, this is a tool which could be used in a destructive and adversarial fashion.
It would be very helpful, for future occasions, to hear from the Minister as to how he thinks this would actually work out in real life.
(a) commercial information the disclosure of which would, or might, significantly harm the legitimate business interests of the person to whom it relates;(b) information relating to the private affairs of an individual the disclosure of which would, or might, significantly harm that person’s interests.”
Lord Clement-Jones
“( ) The cases referred to in subsections (2) and (3) shall be (in so far they would not otherwise be) “relevant merger situations” for the purposes of Part 3 of the Enterprise Act 2002.”
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 278H. This is somewhat of a continuation of the debate that we had at the very beginning of the day, and comes back again to the application of EU competition law. However, it also has merit as an amendment which has its own rationale quite apart from avoiding the full rigour of EU competition law.
Under Part 3 of the Enterprise Act, which Clause 75 of the Bill applies to NHS foundation trusts, mergers are normally looked at by the OFT and the Competition Commission. They consider whether the merger would result in anticompetitive outcomes, governed by Sections 35 and 36 of the Act. However, the Secretary of State can intervene under Section 42 of the Act, where he considers that there is one or more relevant public interest consideration specified under Section 58 of the Act. Such considerations are then taken into account in deciding whether the merger should go ahead, even if there are no anticompetitive outcomes.
Lord Owen
My Lords, I gave notice that I would raise this matter under whether the clause should stand part of the Bill but it is easier and more convenient to do it on this occasion. It is extremely important that this amendment is given serious study by the Government. I hope that either they will produce their own amendment or that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, will push this on Report to a vote.
Not to have such a provision is ridiculous, particularly in view of what we heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Newton, about how long it is taking to conduct mergers between trust hospitals in other areas. It is an ingenious way of doing it. I was trying to work out a way in which it could be done and rather failed. The wording that the noble Lord has come up with is very sensible and I hope that the Government will give it a fair wind. It is all part of the policy of trying to curb this uninhibited competition in every aspect of this Bill.
Baroness Greengross
My Lords, I was recently privileged to be the lead commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission on an inquiry, looking at the human rights of older people in their own homes in need of care and support. This inquiry was a very large one with a lot of evidence, involving 500,000 people in total in this country. We found that half of the people were very happy with the care they received. The other half—250,000 people—were rightly not happy with what had happened. There were awful instances of people being abandoned for 10 or 12 hours, having no social interaction or opportunity to talk or chat. They were left without care for many hours. These are very bad instances of poor care and I really believe that had the staff of the 250,000 people been trained properly in what the tool of human rights can achieve—and if their managers had understood that—a whole lot of these instances of very poor care would not have taken place.
My amendment is designed to ensure some clarity on the application of the Human Rights Act to domiciliary care services commissioned from private and third-sector organisations. This amendment would clarify that providing these services is a public function within the meaning of Section 6(3)(b) of the Human Rights Act 1998. It would bring domiciliary care in line with residential care; similarly, this amendment would confirm that health care services commissioned from private and third-sector organisations fall within the scope of the Human Rights Act. It would clarify the extent of the public sector equality duty because the definition of public function under the Human Rights Act also determines the definition of public function under Section 150(5) of the Equality Act 2010 for the purposes of the public sector equality duty. My amendment also uses wording which is consistent with Schedule 1 to the Health and Social Care Act 2008.
In 2008, Parliament introduced amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill—now the Act—to overturn previous case law and ensure that private and third-sector care homes were defined as carrying out a public function. We were delighted that that applied and that they therefore came under the scope of the Human Rights Act. This received cross-party support and was the result of a long campaign by the EHRC and also the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The campaign aimed to ensure that organisations receiving public money were subject to proper regulation.
We also know that a similar problem is likely to be the case in healthcare if the care is commissioned by the health service to private or third-sector organisations. It is very important to make this clear because the fact that private and third-sector providers operate at the moment outside the scope of the Human Rights Act undermines, or threatens to undermine, the pioneering work of the Department of Health itself in promoting its Dignity in Care campaign. Further, the Health Service Ombudsman has recently documented 10 investigations into NHS care. All of that demonstrates that we need clarity in order to get this right and make sure that people are protected. We must be certain that people are not subjected to breaches of human rights which no one can do much about in the present situation.
I have cut short what I was going to say because it is late, but I do want to say that support for this amendment will clarify beyond doubt the fact that a person commissioned to provide home-based social care or healthcare is, in providing that sort of service, performing a public function within the meaning of the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act. I hope that the Minister will find it possible to support the amendment.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 295G, to which my noble friend Lady Greengross has just spoken, and I strongly support it. As she made clear, it would put an extremely important point beyond doubt. I want briefly to underline three key points.
First, it would remove a major ambiguity about the scope of human rights legislation in relation to health and social care, and with it persisting doubt about the rights of those in receipt of health and social care services. Despite the then Government’s intention that responsibility under the Human Rights Act should follow the outsourcing of state functions, it was generally understood—this was confirmed in the case of YL against Birmingham City Council—that the Human Rights Act covered only residential care provided by local authorities. Private and voluntary organisations that provided care home services under a contract with a local authority were not considered to be performing public functions under the Human Rights Act because there was only a contractual relationship between the parties, and so were not covered. This loophole, as my noble friend Lady Greengross has explained, was closed by Section 145 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008, but only for residential care services. It did not apply to contracted-out social care services provided in people’s homes. The purpose of the amendment is therefore to clarify that the Human Rights Act extends to services provided in people’s homes when provided under contract to a public authority and would remove all ambiguity as to whether the Human Rights Act applies to such services when commissioned from private and voluntary organisations.
As my noble friend has explained, a similar issue arises in relation to health services, especially given the significant increase in the commissioning of NHS services from private and voluntary providers envisaged by the present Bill. Amendment 295G would also place beyond doubt that private and voluntary providers of healthcare services fall within the scope of the Human Rights Act and the public sector equality duty, putting them on a similar footing to providers of residential social care. The amendment would therefore make it clear that those who receive publicly funded health and home care services provided by the private and voluntary sector are guaranteed the same levels of protection and rights to redress as those who receive services provided directly by the state, placing them on the same statutory footing as those who receive residential care services commissioned from the private and voluntary sector.
This is not just a matter of academic importance—the removal of a minor technical anomaly. Quite apart from the fact that it puts beyond doubt that a significant swathe of health and social care provision is within the scope of the Human Rights Act, local authority provision of home care services has been on a downward trend for the past couple of decades, with the result that the state now directly provides only 16 per cent of publicly funded services. This means that 84 per cent of such services are provided by the private and voluntary sector. This figure was less than 5 per cent in 1993. Indeed, the proportion of care delivered by the private and voluntary sector has gone up from 56 per cent to 84 per cent in the last 10 years. This means that the possibility that people in receipt of health and social care services may be deprived of the protection of the Human Rights Act has moved from being an issue at the margins of the field of health and social care to being one of central—indeed, dominating—importance.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, I strongly support the two very powerful and convincing speeches by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and the noble Lord, Lord Low.
I add only a couple of points. First, it is extremely important for the integration of social care from local authorities with health service healthcare to have a similar regime of rules and standings applying to both. All of us in this House have said repeatedly how much we believe in the integration of these two attempts at providing proper care for older people, chronically ill people and disabled people. It is therefore important that we set a standard which is common between the two. That is the first reason why we should all strongly support the amendment that is before us.
The second reason, from my point of view, is that I very much like the phrases used in the amendment, which state in effect that this kind of service is a public service. It is, in a way, ennobled by the fact that it is a service to the public generally, regardless of whether it is provided by the voluntary, independent or NHS sector. That is also very important.
The third point I briefly make is that it has implications which we have to face up to. There is no time to discuss this tonight. But if we actually want there to be a huge improvement in the relationship between the staff of health service and local authority care organisations, whether voluntary, private or NHS, and the elderly and vulnerable people whom we are talking about—and we do want that—then, as this quite clearly implies, the staff themselves must be treated well. It is no good having profoundly exploited, overused, overcriticised staff and expecting them to live up to the great principles of the Human Rights Act. To my mind the importance of this amendment is not just that it passes. It has clear implications for the training, education, support and attitude towards NHS staff, who too often are heavily criticised for what is a difficult yet often extraordinarily well conducted job. In that spirit I strongly support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and the noble Lord, Lord Low.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I also support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. I do so from the perspective of someone who as a special adviser was involved in the framing of the Human Rights Act in 1998. At that time, much of the thinking in the devising of that Act was on the basis that publicly funded services were pretty much synonymous with public delivery of those services. Much of the language around public functions and public authorities was based on that assumption. In fact, that was already out of date at that particular time. Since then, we have never really put this point beyond doubt in legislation. It is timely to do so now, when so many of the services in people’s own homes are contracted out by public bodies to voluntary and private providers. It is a lacuna in the arrangements, despite some of the assurances given by Governments of both persuasions since the Human Rights Act 1998.
Baroness Wheeler
I also support Amendment 295G from the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, replacing the similar amendment from the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Low, both of whom have argued the case strongly and convincingly on this matter.
The importance of addressing current loopholes in the application of the Human Rights Act to publicly funded healthcare and home care services is underlined by the scale of the legal anomaly that the amendment seeks to address. As we have heard, almost 500,000 older people receive essential care in their own homes provided by the local authority. Some 84 per cent of them lack the protection of the Human Rights Act because their care is provided by private or third sector organisations, or independently by 150,000 self-employed personal assistants who care for people in their homes through the application of personal care budgets or direct payments.
The noble Baroness’s own work in highlighting the inadequacy of at least 50 per cent of the home personal care received by older people as part of her recent inquiry underlined the prevalence of human rights abuses in home care settings. The report makes painful reading for all who want dignified and appropriate standards of care for older people in their homes. The stark reality is that, if their human rights are violated through inappropriate standards of care, they at present have no direct legal redress against their care providers.
Of course, we need to make the caveat that good practice is often exemplified by the private and voluntary sector. As a carer, the care provided by the private sector agency to the person I care for at home is of good quality and the care support workers are committed and dedicated professionals, despite long hours and low pay. Their care for the person that I care for is not covered by the Human Rights Act but would be if he were in residential care. That is a serious anomaly. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that the Government recognise that this is a major problem and will take the opportunity presented in the Bill to address the matter. With an increasing number of people receiving home care from a private or voluntary sector organisation rather than directly from their local authority, there is a vital need for certainty around the application of the Human Rights Act to these care providers.
I was going to comment on four other amendments but none of them was spoken to so I will leave it at that.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, we have two diverse areas in this particular group. Clause 75 would consolidate the oversight of mergers involving NHS foundation trusts under the UK general merger control regime operated by the Office of Fair Trading’s Competition Commission. That is the area addressed by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. We argue that the approach that we are taking here would have a number of benefits.
First, it would eliminate the risk of double jeopardy for NHS foundation trusts. Uncertainty currently exists as to when and where the Enterprise Act 2002 would apply to mergers of activities involving foundation trusts. As a result, under the current arrangements for review of mergers involving foundation trusts by the Co-operation and Competition Panel, there is always potential risk of duplication or double jeopardy by both the OFT and the Co-operation and Competition Panel. The Bill proposes to consolidate oversight of foundation trust mergers under the OFT. It would already seem likely that most mergers between foundation trusts would meet the relevant thresholds, eliminating the uncertainty with the current approach. We therefore sympathise with my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones’s amendment but feel that it would not be required as foundation trusts would be captured.
Secondly, the OFT would provide effective, light-touch regulation regarding mergers. This gives confidence to providers that might be considering a merger and ensures that mergers go ahead where they are in patients’ best interests and that the process is not unduly delayed by bureaucratic approvals or the risk of political interference. The evidence demonstrates that this approach does not result in excessive intervention, as the Enterprise Act sets a high threshold for looking at the merging of activities.
Thirdly, the approach would avoid the duplication of specialist resources between the OFT and Monitor, ensuring better value for money. Mergers are a specialist area. It therefore seems a far better use of resources to maintain the responsibility and expertise within the OFT and the Competition Commission rather than resource a further sector-specific body. However, we appreciate and sympathise with the argument put forward that Monitor, as the dedicated health regulator, will have a valuable contribution to make in the review of foundation trust mergers.
As part of any merger investigation, the OFT and the Competition Commission would engage with Monitor as the sector regulator in order better to understand the services involved. They would obtain Monitor’s view on how a merger would affect services and whether it would bring benefits for patients. The OFT would need to consider whether the benefits of higher quality, a greater choice of goods or services and greater innovation outweighed the negative impacts of mergers. These views would then be considered in the analysis, along with other evidence. We want to work with noble Lords to see how we can ensure that Monitor’s role regarding mergers is adequately reflected in the Bill.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones was asking about thresholds. The thresholds for merger reviews are set out in the Enterprise Act. On this basis, the OFT would not generally review mergers involving a turnover of less than £70 million. This contrasts with the approach of the Co-operation and Competition Panel, which operates at significantly lower thresholds.
As my noble friend Lord Howe said in an earlier part of this debate, the operation or otherwise of EU competition law is something that he will take back and consider further in the light of what my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones said. At this stage, therefore, I will not go into that area further, but I refer the noble Lord, Lord Owen, to those discussions and the fruits of those discussions.
We move on to a separate area raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and supported by the noble Lord, Lord Low. The issue raised by Amendments 280 and 295G is one in which I know the Equality and Human Rights Commission is keenly interested, and the Government have carefully considered it in the preparation of the Bill. The issue has been raised with us not only by the EHRC but by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Noble Lords are right: these are extremely important issues.
The department has set out publicly and in detail the reasons for its firm view that private providers are now, and will be in future, exercising public functions when they provide NHS or public health services. The effect of this is that they are bound by the relevant duties in the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act when they provide those services. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, pointed out, these reasons can be found at paragraphs 1534 to 1537 of the Explanatory Notes and in our response to the letter from the Joint Committee on Human Rights to the Secretary of State, which is available on its website.
In summary, our view is based on the following arguments. NHS and public health services will continue to be commissioned by statutory bodies subject to the framework in the 2006 Act. The nature of the services provided will be determined by those commissioning bodies in the exercise of their statutory functions, and is not affected by the status of the provider. The services provided pursuant to those arrangements will be funded by the Secretary of State, the NHS body or the local authority concerned. There will be no contract between the patient and the provider other than where direct payments are concerned. The relevant provisions of the 2006 Act will continue to make no distinction between private and NHS providers.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, I thank the Minister for a totally convincing response. The trouble is that it was a response to an amendment that I did not put, although I could have. The amendment which was responded to would have eliminated the OFT from consideration of FT mergers. My amendment was about inserting an additional ground for consideration by the OFT or the Competition Commission, if it went as far as that, so that the public interest was taken into account, as it is in bank mergers nowadays.
I thought that the Minister’s arguments about why the OFT should be involved were wholly convincing—eliminating double jeopardy with the Co-operation and Competition Panel, providing confidence to providers and so on. Mergers are a specialist area. I am sure that the OFT is great at merger consideration. I deliberately did not put down an amendment about the OFT being eliminated from FT mergers—that was the House of Commons amendment to which I referred in the course of my speech.
The noble Baroness’s assertion that the OFT could ensure that patients’ best interests are looked after is precisely my concern. If ordinary merger principles are followed in terms of the OFT looking at the merging of two foundation trusts, I do not believe that it is in law able to take a very close view of what genuinely is in the public interest in terms of provision of a comprehensive National Health Service. I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Owen, thought that that was ingenious. Certainly, it seemed to be the logical way to try to get some sense into these foundation trust mergers. Therefore, I very much hope that—
Baroness Northover
I do not wish to interrupt my noble friend’s flow. If I have not covered all the areas that he wished to flag up, I will indeed write. However, I made the point that the OFT needed to consider the benefits and the negative sides of mergers in terms of how they would impact on patients. I hope that my noble friend was satisfied at least on that point, even if the leapfrogging and slipping of various amendments from the agenda this evening has tripped me up at this late hour.
Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, we could all be tripped up at this late hour, as, indeed, I was earlier. However, it is a question of what it is possible for the body that is judging the merits of a merger in competition terms to take into account. The reason for including the public interest considerations in the amendment was that the OFT would be extremely limited in the patient considerations that it would be able to take into account. The noble Baroness was pretty sanguine about that. There is still further work to be done in that respect and further consideration needs to be given to the matter. It seems to me that, if nothing else, the question of whether one’s local trust and local foundation hospital will survive as entities is of huge importance to local people and is something that needs to be judged properly with their benefit in mind when the time comes.
Unless I divine that my noble friend is going to give me further guidance or inspiration, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“( ) Where an exemption is granted the Secretary of State—
(a) if the exemption is granted to a prescribed person, must give notice of it to that person, and(b) must publish the exemption.”
Baroness Thornton
“( ) Such criteria must include the requirement, at regular intervals, for all licensees to supply Monitor with financial information, in the interests of meeting standards of financial stability and probity.”
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I start by congratulating noble Lords on making it through this day of debate. We are ending the day with this large group on failure, and the smaller group on pre-failure, tabled by my noble friend, in a moment or so.
In the NHS of 20 years ago, the trusts that got into problems were helped, although the help may have been brutal, with chief executives removed or moved on and nasty phone calls to trust chairs. The system gave powers of intervention from the Secretary of State through local strategic bodies, as they became. Financial help was grudgingly provided, usually for a recovery plan, sometimes delivered and sometimes not. The relationships were not defined by legal contract, and NHS contracts could not be enforced in the courts, so there was a system of arbitration within the NHS.
Those days have gone, and we now have an NHS as a network of many sub-organisations, some with linkages through real contracts. With FTs came the idea of a real contract, although in reality, of course, disputes are still sorted out long before reaching a court. We know that services, and even whole organisations, can fail as the impact of demographic, technological and behavioural changes shape our NHS. In reality, we have to deal with trusts that get into severe difficulties and may be technically insolvent, at which point a real organisation may not be allowed to trade. Then we have to accept that a whole trust might need to be shut down. Indeed, how should that be done? How should the continuity of services be maintained, how should the staff be dealt with, and how should the assets, most of which are owned by the state, be dealt with?
We know that this is the tail end of a bigger and important issue of reconfiguration. So how do we ensure that we can adapt services that show poor quality or that need to be delivered in different ways in different settings? Maybe, as with an increasing array of subspecialities, we have to accept regionalisation. Maybe we need network solutions. Is the market the way to do this? In other markets, innovations lead to changes in demand, and the organisations that cannot adapt close down. Is that what we want for our NHS?
Those who might be so inclined might like to wander through the delicate prose of Simon Burns MP in Committee in the Commons. He loves failure. The idea that you have competition is inextricably linked to having failure. It facilitates the market, brings in the innovators and drives out the inefficient. He believes that failure is a measure of market success, not failure.
It is true that in government we introduced a failure regime as we came to realise that, even after all the support and changes of management team, there may be organisations that are simply not viable. However, it is not so much that they were not viable; it is what that means, that continuing to support them is not giving value for the NHS, however much we adjust that value to include non-financial aspects. Indeed, we also wanted to bring out into the light the murky transactions used within the NHS to support organisations, through means such as brokerage loans. The tendency was for bad performers to be bailed out by the good—the opposite of a reforming system. The way NHS accounts were done also had to be changed to make this kind of smoke-and-mirrors accounting more open.
Issues around failure are more likely to operate at service level than at a whole-organisation level. To take a recent example, a well known and respected financial trust is having issues around its 18-week performance. Its general quality is good but it has signalled that it needs help, and it is indeed getting it from a Department of Health team. The question that we need to ask is: would this kind of support be available in the new world? Presumably, it would not; and even if it were, might that help be deemed anticompetitive? Would that good trust be allowed to fail? The link here to reconfiguration is inescapable.
We know and even admit in our rational moments that reconfiguration on a grand scale is what the Nicholson challenge is really about. The need to move services into community settings and to reduce dependency on the district general hospital model is widely recognised. However, we also know that reconfiguration is beset with political problems. In the run-up to the election, about one-third of constituencies had some kind of campaign to keep open a hospital, a surgery or whatever. One felt sometimes that even if there was no threat, one was invented. We had Andrew Lansley and David Cameron claiming that they would prevent any closures. I think that the Government are learning the hard way that promises made in opposition, especially during election campaigns, may turn out to be millstones when the real burden of decision-making passes to them. The examples of broken promises will continue as reconfigurations gather apace.
This is the issue to which our suspicions should be addressed. Is it part of the rationale to put the blame for nasty politically damaging decisions on others? This abdication of responsibility is characterised by the way that Ministers are trying to give away the key roles of the Secretary of State. This is in part a failure of process but is also a failure of leadership. The leadership should be accountable for delivering answers and necessary changes within a reasonable timescale. If we get reconfiguration right, the failure regime would look less necessary. This is far better for patients than the trauma of seeing their local facilities under constant threat or even being closed down. There are examples of where this has been done, and done well—and we need more of them.
In Committee in the Commons, the Conservatives in particular appeared to believe that these unpopular local changes would be less likely under the Bill—if changes in organisations are branded as failures, then those MPs would be well clear of any responsibility. In fact, we have years of evidence because every reconfiguration has to go through a clinical and management review at an early stage—so we know what works and what does not. We could use that evidence, rely on a robust process and stop opportunist politics. However, we know that the market will not bring about these changes any time soon.
In our NHS, the best interests of patients are served by good information that allows early intervention to improve failing services. CQC inspections are also of value in raising the prospect that poor services will be detected early. If you rely on competition, how long does it take for the public to react to the information that a service is bad and for them to choose to go elsewhere, or for that to impact on the finances to the extent that the service is closed down? In our view, using choice and competition to detect and close poor services takes too long and the cost for patients is indeed too high. That is what this suite of amendments aims to tackle.
The amendment sets licensing criteria to ensure that private providers meet standards around financial stability and probity. We need to supply regular financial information for the good providers. This is, in other words, a sort of Southern Cross test. Amendment 249MBA brings into effect the remaining inactivated arrangements for trust special administration from the 2009 Act, as amendments to the 2006 Act. I remember those well. Amendment 353ZZA is a commencement provision for that. Amendment 295 states that health special administrators must exercise their functions to “protect the interests of patients”. As to the Questions that Clauses 125 to 130 stand part of the Bill, this would create a regime for private companies that provide services to the NHS to have special procedures that augment the normal company provisions under the Insolvency Act. It arguably implies that we need stronger protection from the risk of private provider failure. It should be for the commissioners to factor in the risk of using private providers and contract to ensure that arrangements are in place for contingencies. The licensing regime needs to be tough enough to prevent Southern Cross-type failure through active monitoring.
Risk pooling is what the NHS does. We do not need new risk pools, with the costs that they involve. That is why we think that the clauses should be deleted. Clauses 131 to 143 inclusive allow Monitor to set up the regime to provide special administration for both private and public providers to levy charges on providers and commissioners and to manage the finances of a risk pool.
We argue that none of that is required; it just adds extra complexity and cost. Clause 170 is about FTs and failure. The clause removes the ability to deauthorise a foundation trust. We argue that that power should be retained, along with the recognition that some NHS provider trusts may need to be directly managed under the powers of the Secretary of State.
The new clause in Amendment 303ZA makes clear that the initial effort, in the context of failure, should be remedial action rather than going straight for a failure regime. My noble friend has a similar idea behind his amendment. On Amendment 303ZB, the new clause is intended to reinforce and strengthen how reconfiguration is carried out. Under Amendment 303A to Section 65A of the 2006 Act, bodies to which trusts’ special administration regimes apply should remain, so that the special administration regime applies to FTs and NHS trusts.
Again, we are shortening the Bill and making it simpler and probably taking out quite a lot of cost. I beg to move.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
My Lords, I have several amendments in this group. I shall start with Amendment 294N, which is a probing amendment. As far as I have understood it, social enterprise bodies which are NHS bodies in all but name are coming into existence. They have evolved from PCTs under the transforming community services programme. They will be subject to special health administration arrangements. I ask the Government to confirm whether the social enterprises that come under the health special administration arrangements are coming under arrangements based on insolvency law and that, as such, that allows assets to be transferred outside the NHS and the redundancy payments are not guaranteed.
Amendment 295CA is intended to ensure that clinical commissioning groups are consulted before the Secretary of State makes regulations that allow Monitor to impose charges on commissioners. The charge imposed can include a levy to fund Monitor’s functions that have to be invoked in the event of failures. Amendment 295CB is intended to ensure that when setting such a levy, Monitor takes into account the impact of the levy on the financial stability of the organisation, especially a financial trust that is already in distress or failing. Amendment 304A requires that the commissioners are considered when the services of a failed financial trust are considered by Monitor and should be involved in the decision as to which should be continued, and that such services must include some continuation of education and training, because in planning for the future workforce, if a whole lot of posts were suddenly lost, it would destabilise the workforce planning. That is in addition to considerations such as the service provision and issues of equity and access. That becomes particularly important because if you do not have the staff with the appropriate training, you cannot, in the long term, provide the service anyway.
Amendment 304B is intended to ensure that commissioners are involved in the board's role in agreeing arrangements to secure continued access to NHS services will be achieved. Will that include the board’s selecting which commissioner would become lead commissioner for the process during a failure?
Earl Howe
My Lords, this has been an excellent short debate on a large number of amendments, but focusing on a critical issue, which is what should happen to providers when they get into significant difficulty. While the debate has focused on the role of Monitor, it is the Government’s firm view that commissioners should lead the process of ensuring there are services available to meet the needs of local communities.
The Government brought forward amendments in another place to improve our proposals for ensuring continuity of services. These included removing provisions to apply an insolvency-based approach to foundation trusts in the form of health special administration. If a provider of NHS services becomes unsustainable, there has to be a legal framework that provides effective safeguards to protect patients’ and taxpayers’ interests. We have therefore taken an evolutionary approach in developing proposals to ensure sustainable local services. The Bill sets out a clear framework to achieve this.
We will maintain the existing regime for foundation trusts but we will improve it significantly. First, we have removed the need to de-authorise a foundation trust. This is because the Government are committed to all NHS trusts becoming foundation trusts, so that all NHS providers have the freedom to innovate and drive sustainable improvements in quality and efficiency, and are accountable locally. I am aware that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has tabled amendments which relate to the issue of de-authorisation and we will discuss those when we reach the appropriate clause.
Further, the Government will also ensure taxpayers’ interests would be protected by securing solutions that make best use of available NHS resources. We do not want patients to use, or taxpayers to subsidise, poor quality, inefficient services or providers. Instead we will ensure an end to the culture of hidden bailouts. That is why Clauses 131 to 143 set out provisions for a transparent financing mechanism to fund continuity of services during a period of administration. In addition, I reassure noble Lords that the existing regime for NHS trusts, as distinct from foundation trusts, set out in the 2009 Act, would remain in place. Through a separate health special administration regime, legislation for the first time will also extend equivalent protection to patients who use NHS services provided by a company. Provisions set out in Clauses 125 to 130 would achieve this.
I turn to Amendment 282ZA. The Bill gives Monitor broad powers to collect financial information for the purposes of monitoring providers’ financial stability. Monitor will be gathering a range of information, including financial, to enable it to undertake an ongoing assessment of risk. Monitor would also be able to intervene in order to support a provider to recover and to prevent failure where possible.
I understand that some noble Lords are concerned about the range of interventions available when a provider becomes distressed. Providers themselves can take a range of actions, including improving the management capability and expertise that they have. Commissioners are responsible for securing access to local services and they can use contractual levers to respond to poor performance and prevent provider failure. Monitor would intervene on a provider on the basis of a predefined distress test to prevent failure where possible. The CQC would monitor providers’ compliance against patient safety and quality requirements.
This locally led approach is especially appropriate where there is a pressing need for services to be reconfigured to ensure sustainability. I am sure that noble Lords will agree that a reconfiguration is more likely to succeed if it is based on close partnership working between commissioners, providers, local authorities and their local communities.
Baroness Thornton
Perhaps I may ask for clarification. The noble Earl refers to providers all the way through. Can we be completely clear that this means all providers —that is, private sector providers, NHS providers, social enterprises and charity providers of health services? Do all these levies and fines apply to them?
Earl Howe
My Lords, when I refer to providers of NHS services, I am referring to NHS providers and non-NHS providers. It is to be determined who will contribute to the levy. That is being worked through and I am sure that the noble Baroness will have noticed from the document that we published the other day that this work is ongoing. We will make further announcements about that in due course.
On Amendment 304B, I say that the board should consult the relevant commissioners but it must make the decision itself, which is what the Bill provides for. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, asked whether social enterprises will be within the scope of the health special administration regime. Social enterprises are companies so they will be within the scope of health special administration. It is right that they are not treated as NHS bodies as when assets are transferred from PCTs robust rules apply, as I have set out in detail in previous debates. She asked whether the NHS Commissioning Board would nominate a lead commissioner if a provider becomes unsustainable. The answer is yes.
I hope that noble Lords will find that series of explanations helpful and I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff
Before we finish this set of amendments, I want to mention a particular group. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for her intervention, as I want to refer to charitable sector providers who are finding fundraising particularly difficult now. They are beginning to be hit by the downturn in the economy and the downturn in giving, and there is a real risk that some of the charitable sector providers will find themselves in difficulty. If a levy is imposed on them as well, in terms of their registration with Monitor, that may tip them over. My request is that, in looking at all this, there will be separate consideration of the charitable sector providers from other providers.
Baroness Thornton
I thank noble Lords. I will take only a moment, but we will need to return to this. First, this was not looked at properly in the Commons and I can see that that is the case. Secondly, I recall that the chief executive David Nicholson disagrees. He said that he advocates de-authorisation. I believe that the pooling and the levy are bureaucratic and expensive and that the noble Earl does not understand that reconfigurations will not be led locally. I do not think that the Bill adequately approaches how we will manage reconfigurations. To be kind one has to say that the work is ongoing; I am not quite saying that the department and the Bill team are making this up as they go along, but it is definitely an area to which we will need to return on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“( ) If, at the time Monitor discharges the function under subsection (7), the day specified by the Secretary of State for the purposes of section 14A of the National Health Service Act 2006 has passed or section 6 or 178 has come into force—
(a) in the case of section 14A of the National Health Service Act 2006, the reference in subsection (8)(c) to every Primary Care Trust is to be read as a reference to every clinical commissioning group;(b) in the case of section 6, the reference in subsection (8)(b) to the NHS Commissioning Board Authority is to be read as a reference to the National Health Service Commissioning Board;(c) in the case of section 178, the reference in subsection (8)(d) to the Care Quality Commission is to be read as including a reference to its HealthWatch England committee.”
(a) commercial information the disclosure of which would, or might, significantly harm the legitimate business interests of the person to whom it relates;(b) information relating to the private affairs of an individual the disclosure of which would, or might, significantly harm that person’s interests.”
(a) commercial information the disclosure of which would, or might, significantly harm the legitimate business interests of the person to whom it relates;(b) information relating to the private affairs of an individual the disclosure of which would, or might, significantly harm that person’s interests.”
Lord Davies of Stamford
“(5A) Where the commissioner of a health service receives an offer from a service provider licenced under section 80 at a price below the price that is payable by virtue of this Chapter, the commissioner shall seek the agreement of Monitor before placing any order for this service.
(5B) Before acceding to a request from a commissioner in accordance with subsection (5A), Monitor shall satisfy itself that—
(a) the quality of the service to be provided will not be inferior to the same service provided by another supplier at the price payable by virtue of this Chapter, and(b) there will be no consequent unacceptable impact on the structure or capabilities of the NHS.(5C) Subject to the considerations under subsection (5B), Monitor shall not unreasonably withhold its consent.”
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I had intended to move this, and to take the opportunity to respond to one or two points that the Minister made on my proposal on competitive pricing, but in view of the lateness of the hour I will find another opportunity to pursue the argument with him.
“( ) In this Schedule, “objector” means—
(a) in relation to a reference made where the condition in section 118(2)(a) is not met, each clinical commissioning group who objected to the proposed method to which the reference relates, and(b) in relation to a reference made where the condition in section 118(2)(b) or (c) is not met, each licence holder who objected to that proposed method.”
“( ) The Competition Commission must give notice to each objector who has made representations in accordance with paragraph 2 of the time and place at which an oral hearing is to be held.”
Lord Warner
“Prior actions to health special administration orders
(1) Monitor shall produce annually a report to the National Commissioning Board setting out those trusts and their associated health economies where it considers that, on the evidence available, trusts are at serious risk of Monitor seeking a health special administration order unless urgent action is taken to review existing services and agree reconfiguration of those services to ensure their clinical and financial sustainability and this report shall be made available promptly to the Secretary of State, Parliament and the relevant clinical commissioning groups and health and wellbeing boards.
(2) It shall be the responsibility of the National Commissioning Board, in consultation with the relevant clinical commissioning groups and health and wellbeing boards, to establish a mechanism for producing a response to Monitor within six months of the annual report’s publication on how the services in specified areas can be made clinically and financially sustainable and the extent to which these proposals are agreed by local organisations on behalf of the public.
(3) It shall be for Monitor to decide whether the Board’s response is adequate to secure clinical and financial sustainability in particular areas and, after informing the Secretary of State, to publish its decisions on proposed changes and should the Secretary of State decline to accept Monitor’s decision in a particular case he or she should inform Parliament with his or her reasons, together with his or her alternative proposals for securing clinical and financial sustainability in the particular health economy.
(4) It shall be open to Monitor, by agreement with the Secretary of State and the National Commissioning Board, to establish a panel of independent people with appropriate expertise to assist with securing local agreement on the reconfiguration of services required to secure clinical and financial sustainability.”
Lord Warner
My Lords, I rise to a rapt audience to move Amendment 295AA, which will really test the concentration powers of your Lordships’ House. The amendment would insert a new clause on actions that could be taken to reconfigure services in the interests of sustainability before the Bill’s failure regime kicks in. It follows on from the previous group of amendments spoken to, in particular, by my noble friend Lady Thornton.
I had one go at this issue at an earlier stage in our discussions and did not get very far. I have now discussed this issue further with a range of opinion inside and outside your Lordships’ House. This amendment, which has the support of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, is the product of a continuing interest in this issue. There is now widespread recognition across the NHS that there has to be a major reconfiguration of services to make them more fit for purpose, more clinically sustainable and more financially sustainable, given the financial and demographic challenges faced by the NHS for the foreseeable future. In a nutshell, specialist services need to be reconfigured on fewer sites, and many district general hospitals have to be reshaped on their sites with a different kind of health and healthcare campus and more social care services alongside them. Far more services need to be delivered in a community, rather than in a hospital, setting.
As was borne out in the discussion on the last group of amendments, the Government seem to be placing a great—and, I would say, undue—faith in local commissioners facing up to this reality and delivering the necessary changes. Meanwhile, MPs, including Cabinet Ministers, continue to march with placards in front of their local hospitals, opposing change and trying to protect their parliamentary majorities. They fear being “Kidderminstered” as majorities and the number of seats shrink. It will only get worse as 2015 approaches.
Much sensible opinion in the NHS simply does not believe that local areas and commissioners can deliver the scale of change required on an unaided basis. It fears that people will stand on the burning platform until failure engulfs them or a cheque arrives. The Government have said that the cheque is not going to arrive, so they are going to stand on the burning platform, as I see it, until the failure regime kicks in. Monitor does not want to be placed in a position where it is endlessly using the failure regime. It will want to intervene when the warning signs are there, rather than waiting for the special administration system to be required. Despite the Secretary of State’s promises of robust decision-making on service reconfiguration, there is little experienced NHS opinion that believes that the elected political class will take the tough decisions fast enough and in sufficient numbers to produce a more orderly reconfiguration of NHS services.
I asked the Secretary of State following one of his robust public utterances at a conference whether he had actually told his Cabinet colleagues how robust he was going to be. The example of Chase Farm continues to affect NHS opinion and behaviour. People want a more reliable pre-failure regime that can be triggered in a timely way that does not totally rely on local commissioners to take action on their own and that imposes some discipline on the elected political class—if I may so describe them—to take decisions in a timely way. That is what Amendment 295AA attempts to do.
Subsection (1) requires Monitor to report annually to the national Commissioning Board those trusts and their associated health economies that are in real danger of clinical and financial unsustainability that will trigger the special administration regime. This report would put everybody from the Secretary of State to the local clinical commissioning groups on notice that action needs to be taken.
Under Subsection (2), it would then be for the national Commissioning Board to gather everybody together locally and agree a mechanism for producing a response within six months of service reconfigurations that would achieve financial and clinical sustainability.
Subsection (3) gives Monitor the decision on whether the solutions proposed are adequate, and if so, to inform the Secretary of State accordingly. The Secretary of State is not cut out of the loop. The Secretary of State could decline to accept Monitor’s decision, but in doing so he or she would have to inform Parliament of their reasons for rejecting it and publish alternative proposals to secure,
“clinical and financial sustainability in the particular health economy”
concerned. To aid this process, subsection (4) enables Monitor,
“by agreement with the Secretary of State and the National Commissioning Board to establish a panel of independent people with expertise”,
to help local area commissioning groups with the necessary reconfiguration of services.
No one under this amendment is cutting out the people at the local level and no one is cutting out the Secretary of State. We are just introducing a bit more discipline into this particular process, one in which it has proved very difficult to achieve change. I hope that the Minister will take this amendment in the spirit with which it is offered. It is there to respond to a widespread concern that we need a better and clearer pre-failure regime that can be used to bring about a more speedy reconfiguration of services in the interests of clinical and financial sustainability, but that also preserves local involvement with expert external facilitation and keeps the Secretary of State involved, albeit with disincentives to political deferment of decisions. The challenges that the NHS faces over the rest of this decade make this an issue that we should address urgently, and in my view we should have something on the face of the Bill to help the NHS engineer the reconfiguration of services that it will so badly need in the coming years. I beg to move.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, at this late hour I will keep the Committee only for a moment or two. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Warner, on a courageous, statesmanlike and important amendment. We all believe that there have to be huge changes in the NHS, those of us who support it very strongly just as much as those who are critical of it. The noble Lord has thoughtfully tried to produce a machinery of government that will enable some of these extremely difficult decisions to be made. Perhaps I may say without, I hope, offending anybody, that there are echoes here of what happened to the Governments of Greece and Italy—flatly refusing to look at the realities, refusing to change, and ending up with effectively a total loss of trust in the democratic system. I believe that this amendment is an attempt to try to get away from that and to begin to mobilise a much larger section of the public for the changes that have to be made. That can be done only through open debate and the willingness of politicians to get up and express the need for change and their support for it, not by hiding away and doing the popular thing when that is almost certain to bring about the destruction of the remaining health services in any effective way.
I congratulate the noble Lord and say that he is brave to have done this, and to point out rather harshly that we all have to learn that we cannot at one and the same time take part in Chase Farm demonstrations and Chase Farm decisions. What that means is that, inescapably, the Secretary of State has to be at the centre of this operation, unpleasant though it is, because—as most of those who have been in Government know—either you have to take unpleasant decisions or you have to resign. What you cannot do is dodge the issue by saying, “It is nothing to do with me”, because in the end that will not carry the public with you. It is the public we need to mobilise behind us.
Baroness Murphy
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment because it fills in the hole in this Bill that I am still worried about. Clauses 95 and 96 contain good ways of intervening early in individual failures on quality and the financial governance of providers that will enable Monitor to get in and do the business it needs to do with individuals, but what we have not got are the mechanisms that will allow Monitor to address at an early stage failures that can be seen coming up in a local health economy.
I have already experienced in the current regime how difficult it is for a regulator to get discussions going locally between trusts and local commissioners on how to address a local service failure. I well remember the whole of the Monitor board going down to the south-west—the trust will remain nameless—to address a failure of the local economy, to discuss it with the strategic health authority and to attempt to come to a conclusion and come up with a plan about how the local economy would solve the problem. The Minister has already mentioned bailouts. The solution was that the strategic health authority would give a bung, which it duly did and which sent the problem away. But in fact the problem did not go away because the local economy was still failing.
It is this early failure—where you can see that things are mounting up, that it is not going to work and that the sums are not going to add up—for which we need some mechanism. This is a clever scheme, but it may be too interventionist. It may be put into blocks which are too chunky to be inserted into the Bill as it is. But we need to address the problem of failure before it gets to the point of administration. As the noble Lord, Lord Warner, says, Monitor will not want to implement the failure regime and the administration regime until things have gone desperately awry. It should not implement the failure regime when the problem is an economy problem and not a trust problem. We need to have some reassurance that there will be some support for local people who are trying to tackle this in a meaningful way.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I do not want to hold up the House for too long, but I feel that someone should respond to my noble friend Lord Warner’s amendment on behalf of what he rather dismissively described as the elected political class. I am proud to say that I was a member of that elected political class for 23 years, representing Grantham and Stamford. In the course of those 23 years I had to take action to save both Grantham hospital and Stamford Hospital, separately and at different times, when they were threatened with closure. I used all the methods which my noble friend is no doubt familiar with: meetings with Ministers, lining up local government support, petitions, threatening judicial reviews—even potentially funding a judicial review—and heading major marches. I remember leading over 9,000 people through the streets of Grantham and 5,000 through the streets of Stamford. We won in both cases. Grantham is still a very successful local district hospital and Stamford is a smaller hospital—what you might call a cottage hospital.
The point I wanted to make is this: I would have welcomed the sort of report from Monitor which my noble friend is suggesting. If one wants to save one’s local hospital, and one wants to make sure that the right decisions are made about the health of one’s constituents, one wants a warning as early as possible about the financial or clinical problems—or both—that may be arising. There are often all sorts of alternatives that one can find to closure. It is important for democratic confidence in the NHS that all the possibilities are thoroughly explored and everybody is content that the decision has not simply been taken behind closed doors and then announced to the public when there could have been some initiative that might have saved the day. On behalf of the—slightly dismissed—elected political class, I thoroughly support the amendment of my noble friend.
Baroness Thornton
I have a very small piece of advice to give the Minister. I always think that it is best to give in and agree with my noble friend Lord Warner. I have almost always found that this is the best course of action. The noble Earl might recall that, when I was a Minister, on one of the occasions where I did not give in I certainly came a cropper. I urge the Minister to think very carefully and seriously about what my noble friend has had to say. It merits great attention and it merits being in the Bill.
Earl Howe
My Lords, before that intervention I was about to say that I was very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, had returned us to this issue, which I, like he, regard as extremely important. It is a thoughtful amendment and will certainly prompt further thought on my part after this debate.
I do not think that there is any difference between the noble Lord and myself in this respect. I am certainly all in favour of ensuring that wherever possible there is early intervention and proactive monitoring of organisations well in advance of failure so that failure can be averted. The main difference between us, if there is one, is that we believe that this process should be locally led and not led from the centre, which is how I read his amendment. I probably read it wrongly. When the noble Lord spoke to it, he indicated that nothing in it was intended to run counter to that locally led process. I take that on board.
Why are we so keen on a locally led process? The overall aims that we set out are to put patients, carers and local communities at the heart of the NHS, shifting decision-making as close as possible to individual patients and devolving power to professionals and providers, liberating them from top-down control. This amendment would appear to do the opposite and could lead to an increasing level of decisions being centralised and moved away from local communities and their democratic representatives. The more that one does that, the less likely one is to get local buy-in. In a patient-led NHS, if it is to be worthy of the name, any changes to services have to begin and end with what patients and local communities need.
Baroness Thornton
Does not the experience of the last few years—we can name the hospitals concerned—show exactly the opposite of what the noble Earl is now saying to us, that this has to be locally led? We have to find some mechanism which allows decisions to be taken that does not dismiss or ignore local feelings. Of course people have to be involved in those decisions but, at the end of the day, we know about Chase Farm and several hospitals I could name. In north London, we know that we have too many hospitals. They have not been closed down because it is politically too difficult to do so. If the decision remains at local level, in north London we will still have too many hospitals. I have lots of MP friends who have campaigned to keep those hospitals in place, particularly before the last general election. It seems that what the noble Earl is outlining now will not work.
Earl Howe
Contrary to popular opinion, there have been cases of very successful and rapid reconfigurations of services. Of course, the ones that come to our attention are those that have taken a long time, such as Chase Farm. There is no better or worse example than that.
In reading this amendment, we should be cautious about any process that would significantly weaken both local commissioner autonomy and public engagement. We do not want to conflict with the statutory requirement for NHS bodies to ensure appropriate and proportionate involvement of patients and the public in service changes or reduce the ability for local authority scrutiny to bring effective democratic challenge to reconfiguration plans. I certainly do not think there is a case to reduce democratic accountability in this way.
I agree with the noble Lord that, where it is not possible to reach local agreement on a service change proposal, there should be mechanisms for independent review. We are retaining powers in the Bill for local authority scrutiny functions to be able to refer reconfiguration schemes. As part of the transition, we are also exploring how the NHS Commissioning Board and Monitor can work together to support commissioners and providers. As I have said, the key to successful service change is ensuring engagement with the local community and stakeholders so as to secure as broad support as possible in what can be very difficult decisions.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I am grateful to everyone who has spoken in this debate for the support that the thrust of the amendment has received. I reassure the Minister that it is not the purpose of the amendment to exclude local commissioners or local people from involvement in reshaping their services. They would feature in the report to the national Commissioning Board mentioned in the amendment only if they were clearly not getting on with the job of making changes. If they were getting on with that job, fine—they would not feature in the report.
I think that we struggle with the situation that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, mentioned, that you cannot solve the problem of a particular hospital trust without looking at the problems around the much wider health economy. Often, the local clinical commissioning groups will struggle with the breadth of the economy that they have to consider.
I do not want to delay the House any further. I will certainly take up the Minister’s offer of discussions and I would welcome any contributions from other noble Lords. We need to make progress on this issue before we complete the Bill’s consideration in this House. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“( ) In this section and section 139 a “potentially liable provider” means a provider on whom Monitor is proposing to impose the levy for the coming financial year (regardless of the amount (if any) that the provider would be liable to pay as a result of the proposal).”
Charities Bill [HL]
(12 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text