Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill

Debate between Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom and Christopher Chope

Friday 27th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Arbuthnot]

After hearing valuable comments from both sides of the House, I have come to the conclusion that my new clauses would not be helpful and I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.



New Clause 3

Statutory duty of the Health Service Ombudsman

‘It shall be a statutory duty of the Health Service Ombudsman to resolve any complaints within twelve months of the date when the complaint was received.’—(Mr Chope.)

Brought up, and read the First time.

[Mr Chope]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is a pity that he did not put down an amendment to my new clause to replace the limit of 12 months with one of six months. We know that the Bills that we debate on Fridays involve an iterative process. If the new clause were accepted today by my right hon. Friend, we would start off with a 12-month limit, which might in due course move to six months. That deadline, which will have the effect of concentrating minds, makes the measure legally meaningful, whereas, at the moment, everything in the Bill is legally meaningless. The Bill is, as someone has said in relation to the draft clauses of the Scotland Bill, “legally vacuous”.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

How does my hon. Friend deal with the problem that there might be some issues that are outside the control of the ombudsman? For example, the ombudsman might be hoping for a response from a health provider that he is simply not getting. How would the ombudsman then obey the statutory duty that we would be applying?

[Mr Chope]

Unlike quite a lot of organisations, the ombudsman is accountable to this House. If the ombudsman were experiencing the difficulty to which my right hon. Friend refers, I would expect the ombudsman, the chief executive or chairman to contact my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) and say that they wished the Public Administration Committee to look into the matter and put pressure on the recalcitrant Department. In a sense, my right hon. Friend is saying that, because we may have customers—if that is the right expression—who are minded to delay things, we should facilitate enabling them to delay things beyond a year. We need to focus on who the real customer is. The customer is the person who has made a complaint, and whose complaint has been accepted for investigation by the ombudsman. In my view, they are entitled to have a decision on that complaint within 12 months, which is why I put in this statutory duty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Arbuthnot]

Might one not read that in a positive way by saying that if the complaints are found not to have been justified, that suggests that the national health service is doing a pretty good job?

[Mr Chope]

I do not go along with that, I am afraid. It is rather like saying that we should encourage the maximum number of complaints against something, engaging bureaucracy and taxpayer expenditure to deal with the complaints, to give some perverse satisfaction to the people who want to say that the Government service, in this case the health service, is doing a good job. If we want to measure consumer satisfaction with public services, there is a much more direct way of doing it than looking at how many complaints against their services have been made and rejected.

By way of an aside, one difficulty with the ombudsman service is that it cannot take on complaints from public sector organisations. In my constituency, for example, a head teacher of a school that was unfairly done down by Ofsted was told—or it was implied—that he could complain to the ombudsman service, but the ombudsman service deemed his complaint to be outside its scope. Although he is an individual, as he is the head of a school, Ferndown upper school, the complaint is regarded as coming from a public organisation and therefore does not come within the scope of the ombudsman’s rules. I would prefer to see the scope of the ombudsman to investigate issues widened, while keeping a focus on complaints that are prima facie likely to be well founded, to going down the road of saying that we should have many more complaints and that when we reject those complaints it means that the public services are doing very well. That is where I would disagree with the ombudsman service’s strategy, which is to try to maximise the number of complaints.

When people make complaints, it often involves quite an effort on their part and they normally make them on the basis that they expect a positive result. They do not make them hoping that their complaint will be rejected, thereby endorsing the national health service, local government organisation or other body for performing in a way that did not result in the complaint against them being justified. The best organisations are organisations that have no complaints against them and I should have thought that that was what we should be aiming for—a health service in which there were no complaints, or in which all the complaints were dealt with long before they came before the ombudsman.

Those are my amendments. I shall leave my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) to address his amendments 1 and 2. If some of these amendments were accepted, I think the Bill might have some worth and value.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) suggests that I might like to address amendments 1 and 2. During the last debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) pointed out that I was not suggesting that the health service ombudsman should keep the complainants properly informed and I said that I was persuaded that it was not actually necessary to do so. What I should have said was that I had proposed an amendment to do so in the next group of amendments, but during the course of that debate I persuaded myself out of the value of amendments 1 and 2 so I think it would be best for me simply to sit down and not move them. What my hon. Friend the Minister and my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) said in answer to that debate satisfied me that more detailed legislation for the ombudsman, apart from the extent to which my right hon. Friend wishes to change the law, is probably not helpful.

In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, I do not agree with the rather rigid approach that his new clause 3 might introduce. Inevitably, there will be some complaints that are so complicated and in which so many people are involved in answering the issues that it would be a bad idea to place on to the ombudsman a duty that, with the best will in the world, they might simply not be able to fulfil. During the course of the morning I have been looking for a quotation from Idi Amin, referring to someone who had displeased him. He said, “When we catch him, he will be executed. He will have a trial, of course, but by trial I do not mean one of those things that goes on all day.” I think that that is the approach favoured by my hon. Friend in the new clause. I hope that he will forgive me if I do not support his new clause and fail to move my amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

May I thank everybody who has participated in this debate and my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), the Bill’s promoter, for his generous offer to at least consider amendment 3? I do not mean to be churlish, but it is a problem that we are debating the Bill on the penultimate private Members’ Friday. If my right hon. Friend were to choose, on reflection, to incorporate amendment 3 in an amendment in the other place, he would, in effect, jeopardise his Bill, because we would then have to consider it again after it had been amended. The Minister has indicated her potential support, so perhaps she would like to intervene on me to guarantee that, should that eventuality arise, the Government would give the Bill the necessary time to ensure that it was not frustrated by that process but reached the statute book. I must say that I am tempted to press amendment 3 to a vote, because it might be easier to include it in the Bill now rather than have a promise that something will be done later.

One could sum up this debate by saying, “Excuses, excuses, excuses.” It is so easy for public sector organisations to make excuses about why they cannot meet particular time limits.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

My hon. Friend has made a valid point about the remaining number of private Members’ Fridays. I hope that the ombudsman will at least read this debate and recognise that it would be best practice to put into her report the relevant time—in other words, as amendment 3 says,

“before the end of that period”.

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for putting that suggestion, which could help, on the record.

On the issue of excuses, I fear that we are entering the territory of double standards. When my constituents who are company directors are required to submit their company accounts by a particular day and fail so to do, or when other constituents are required to submit their tax return by 31 January and fail to do so, that failure incurs a penalty of £100 and there is no room for excuses such as family bereavements, delays by accountants or third parties and all the rest of it. In relation to the excuses made by Departments, or the ombudsman in this case, on which we want to place similar obligations, we are not consistent.