Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Campbell of Alloway Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

Lord Campbell!

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

Thank you very much. I will make one short point. All your Lordships, wherever you may sit in this House, know perfectly well that if this Bill is delayed, urgent requisite reform cannot be used or done, to the detriment of the public. For that reason alone, I oppose this amendment.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I am sure that we are about to reach a conclusion. I want simply to make an obvious point which may have been missed. It is that we have had an interesting debate, going on now for the best part of an hour, most of which has not been about the amendment on the Order Paper. I know that this can be disturbing at times, but I would like to remind the House of what it is going to make a decision about—or, perhaps, what it is not making a decision about. It is not making a decision about the freedom of information legislation, on much of which I might find myself in complete agreement with the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Wilson. It has many problems and difficulties associated with it, not least for Ministers. Ministers in this Government are finding that, just as much as Ministers in the previous Government did. However, it is not about the merits of the Freedom of Information Act—that is for another time. It is not about the merits of risk registers, good, bad or indifferent, and there are all those categories of risk registers. It is not about the merits of the Bill, where we are considering whether it should have a Third Reading now. It is about the momentous decision that the House must reach shortly: whether the Third Reading of this Bill should be delayed for, in my estimate, three weeks. That is the decision we are being asked to make.

With respect to previous speakers, that makes one or two of their contributions problematic, if not redundant: those who have suggested that somehow it will be very serious, if not cataclysmic, for the health service in this country if the Bill is further delayed. I have not been involved with the debates on the Bill, but it already seems to have been going on for most of my life, as far as I can see; certainly for 12 months. Are we really being asked to accept the proposition that a further three weeks—that is my estimate, and I will come to my question to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, in a moment—will somehow traumatise the health service? That is an unsustainable proposition. I would not have voted for the amendment had it not referred to the specific point at the end, which is that the House must be able to reach a decision on Third Reading before Prorogation. That is what we are being asked to do. As we all know, the Queen’s Speech is in May—I cannot remember the date—so Prorogation is not too far away.

I know that the House will not vote on the basis of the point that I am making. The proposition is simple and straightforward, and I cannot believe that it is of the cataclysmic significance that one or two speakers have suggested. I have no doubt that we have reached the stage, which we have all been around long enough to recognise with this kind of legislation, where government supporters just want to get it over with, for which I do not blame them, and the Opposition want to ensure, even at this eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, that they have a few more opportunities to point that this really is a bad Bill—a view held not only by the Opposition but by the whole of the medical profession and, as far as we know, most of the public.