Regulation of Health and Social Care Professions Etc. Bill [HL]

Lord Patel Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 3rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I was given clear instructions not to jump the gun before the Senior Deputy Speaker spoke.

I support the Bill and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has brought it to the House. If it does what he thinks it might, which is nudge the Government to bring forward some kind of draft regulatory Bill, that would be helpful. I declare my interests: I am a fellow of several medical royal colleges, most of which are freebies. I am overdue to pay my General Medical Council dues and if I do not pay them this week, I will no longer be on its register—but today I am, I hope, still on it.

I have been involved in such debates before. We had a debate on the Law Commission report and I have asked questions on two occasions related to this. On both occasions we were promised that the Government had the intention to bring in the legislation—which is, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said, very much needed. The Medical Act 1983 is outdated, bureaucratic and inflexible. It is not doing patients any good because the GMC, as we have heard, is not able to bring the regulatory regimes to bear on people who do not do what it expects them to do.

I tried to find out whether there was any example of where a jurisdiction similar to ours, with a single regulatory body for health professionals, works. There is one. It was set up about 80 years ago in Australia. It is very similar to ours. There are several different health professional bodies and a lot of the professions are not covered—which, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned, is the case with us. So I asked a question: in the light of your experience of the past six or seven years, what have been the key advantages? I got an extensive response. The key advantages are: being able to drive consistency in regulatory requirements across professions, such as common standards in areas including criminal history, English language and advertising requirements; a largely aligned code of conduct; and some degree of consistency in the jurisdiction side.

More importantly, there is better knowledge exchange between professions in embedding leading practice in regulation and a single piece of legislation for the regulation of all registered professions. There are 14 professions in Australia’s case; in our case, it would be 32 or more. There are potential efficiency benefits in having a single organisation to provide all the operational support and in being able to modernise that through a single effort, ranging from corporate services to include—importantly—legal and regulatory services.

There are significant wider benefits in having a single source of comprehensive workforce data in a single depository for wider workforce projections and planning. That is something we suffer from badly in this country. Our workforce planning for the NHS and social care is dreadful, as we will no doubt hear in forthcoming debates. One reason we are not able to do skills-mix training is because of the separate regulatory authorities.

There are also advantages for the community in a single, national online register in which all registered practitioners can be found. Common registration types make it easier to understand and allow increasingly greater consistency in how regulatory decision-making is applied across professions, particularly in fitness to practise. It also allows a national approach to raising community awareness and understanding of how to complain and of what registration means.

The community expects that all registered practitioners should be held to a similar level of accountability; that is, there should be a lower criminal history threshold for some professions. I think the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned that. There should also be a single front door for raising concerns about fitness to practise across professions. It will make health professionals work more closely together and therefore bring about better integration of the requirements for the accreditation of approved programmes of study. We badly need integrated common study modules. It would help with workforce planning and make for a better regulatory regime, which is badly needed. We will all ask the same question of the Minister: when will the Government bring in the legislation?