Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Cumberlege Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner]

I never thought that I would be outflanked on the Stalinist wing of the Labour Party by any Member of your Lordships’ House, but clearly I have that all wrong. I would be happy to strengthen these proposals because I rather share my noble friend’s view that I may be being a little wimpish here, but I was deferring to the elected politicians on this, probably unwisely. I am producing this rather wimpish proposal, but somewhere along the way we certainly have to have a trigger that is independent of the political process. We need some outside facilitation of change with the local people and we have to restrict, to some extent, the ability of elected Ministers to totally undo or avoid taking decisions in this area, possibly as much as my noble friend is saying.

[Baroness Cumberlege]

Those words are so warm to my heart, I cannot tell the noble Lord how much. One of the things that really concerns me is delay. I am worried that if we get this outside group it will delay matters, because some of this is very urgent at the moment. What is the relationship between this and the independent review panel—I am not sure what it is called—which deals with hospitals at the moment?

[Earl Howe]

It is the Independent Reconfiguration Panel.

[Baroness Cumberlege]

I am indebted to my noble friend for that. Does the Independent Reconfiguration Panel play a part in this? Is it something different? Do we have to go through that as well, in which case it will take even longer?

[Lord Warner]

Something equivalent to the Independent Reconfiguration Panel was used earlier in the system. It was put in to bat with the local area by Monitor when it saw trouble coming down the railway track in the form of failure. I envisage that a standing group of people would be approved to work in this area, which Monitor would be able to assemble very quickly. My amendment proposes that a timescale is set for this panel to work with local people and to come back with a solution to the problem, but I think that more people than are currently approved for the reconfiguration panel will be needed because of the points made by my noble friend. In many parts of the country we are likely to have to intervene quite quickly because we have spent a lot of time over the past 10 or 20 years putting off decisions about some of these places. A lot of these places will come to Ministers, the national Commissioning Board and Monitor over the next few years, so we will need quite a few different panels.