Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Friday 27th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nuttall]

That is right, and it prompts a question about whether some advantage is to be gained by the commissioner providing more help at the initial stages to try to signpost people. Indeed, the annual report states that the ombudsman receives about 40,000 contacts a year, including queries about where and how to complain about public and non-public services. Of those 40,000 contacts, 27,566 were inquiries for the commissioner, which demonstrates that many members of the public will quite innocently contact the commissioner about matters that do not fall within her responsibilities.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Does that show that new clause 1 is ill conceived? It states that before people make a complaint they must get an estimate of how long it is likely to take to resolve it. However, the bigger issue for people before they make a complaint is what the chances are of it being accepted for investigation.

[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. People may assume that they have simply to make a complaint for it to be followed up, but as statistics from the commissioner’s report show, that is not the case. Many complainants would presumably like someone to deal with their complaint, but are disappointed at the outset before they have even got going, and are told, “I’m sorry; you’ve come to the wrong person.” It may be that there is nobody to deal with that complaint, and the complainant is sent off to look elsewhere.

I have one further point on the detail of new clause 1. If the commissioner was expected to make a more accurate assessment of the time within which the complaint is likely to be completed, she would have to find out much more detail about the nature of the complaint. That would obviously entail more work for her and her staff. It is the law of unintended consequences: we may find that imposing more obligations and burdens on the staff of the ombudsman’s office, in an attempt to be helpful, extends the length of time it takes for a complaint to be resolved, because staff will be engaged in assessing how long it would take to deal with a new complaint, rather than getting on with dealing with complaints. That is a problem.

I accept that all these matters could be dealt with by providing extra resources. We have not really addressed that point so far this morning; it is the elephant in the room. I do not think this is outside the scope of the new clause. If we impose, or even just set out, an expectation on the commissioner to follow this provision, there will be implications for the deployment of resources. The commissioner could rightly say, “Well, it is all very well expecting me to give an estimate to every member of the public who approaches my office of how long their case will take, but where are the extra resources?” That would be a legitimate question to ask. Otherwise, the commissioner is likely to say that complaints might take about a year, which would probably not be very helpful to most prospective complainants.

New clause 2 relates to complainants who, perhaps having looked at the website, have decided that regardless of the length of time it will take, they will make a complaint. The new clause states:

“The Health Service Commissioner shall make available to the complainant, at the outset of an investigation, an estimate of the period within which the investigation is likely to be completed.”

That implies that initial details have already been taken. I would expect this to be rather more specific advice than that provided to a member of the public. This is someone who has lodged a specific complaint, which the commissioner has accepted. It is a small point, and I have not bothered tabling an amendment to new clause 2, but I would prefer it to read, “The health service commissioner shall give the complainant, within 14 days of the outset of an investigation, an estimate of the period in which the investigation is likely to be completed.” I would have tried to tighten it up a little bit, but I nevertheless accept that that is the wording put forward by my right hon. Friend.

I raised a point about providing updates. My right hon. Friend’s response was that there was no need to legislate on that, because he felt that the commissioner was providing updates anyway. If she is, I could use the same argument about new clauses 1 and 2. If we have no evidence—no one has been able to provide any—that this is a problem, either for members of the public, in respect of new clause 1, or for specific complainants, in respect of new clause 2, I have to question whether these new clauses are required at all. On balance—I accept that it is a fine balance—I do not think that they are required, and should he press either new clause to a Division, I would vote against it, but only because, as he has said himself about legislation to provide updates, there is no need for legislation to require the commissioner to provide this information to the public or a specific complainant.

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[Mr Davis]

Yes, there are laws of nature and there are laws of man, and in Eric Forth’s case, there are forces of nature which sometimes are the forces of man. It is a wonderful paradox, but given that it was my right hon. Friend who provoked me to conjure the five laws, I blame him, not myself.

My right hon. Friend made a very thoughtful speech, and perhaps met Eric Forth’s sixth law, which is that all this has to be tested—that is the point of this House, and it was Eric Forth, more than anybody, who insisted that we did not just shovel through, sausage-like, a set of laws because the Administration or some pressure group wanted them, but that we tested them, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North has been doing that this morning.

This reform is likely to be the first of a number picked up by the Executive, not by us. The Public Administration Committee is looking at this, the Department of Health is looking at it, the ombudsman’s office itself is looking at it, and the Cabinet Office is also looking at the issues raised by my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend. The Executive will be aiming to minimise the number of times complaints are turned down out of hand; to minimise the number of times people are told, “You’ve got the wrong department. Complain to somebody else”; and to minimise the constraints on the ombudsman’s office that might not permit it to intervene; and they will also be aiming to deal with the resource issue. It seems to me that we do not need to solve those problems. It is for the Executive to do so properly in Executive time, with debate going on across the Front-Bench teams. It is for them to deal with that; we are dealing with a simple problem here.

[Mr Chope]

When my right hon. Friend discussed the Bill in Committee, he contemplated the prospect of introducing amendments at this stage to reflect the outcome of the deliberations taking place in government and elsewhere. In the light of the Government’s failure to deliver a timely response, how much confidence does he have that they have the will to do this?

[Mr Davis]

A lot of confidence. I do not wish to pre-empt the Government’s forthcoming announcements, but neither do I want to push them into doing anything ill thought through. If the law of unintended consequences applies to anything, it applies to Government legislation—more than anything else. I am confident that this will happen, and in a way that will command support across the House. As my hon. Friend knows, it may be dangerous to make a prediction, but I think there will be agreement. Whatever happens in the general election, I believe these reforms are coming.

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[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.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 3, in clause 1, page 1, line 7, after ‘Commissioner’ insert—

‘before the end of that period’.

Amendment 4, page 1, line 8, at end insert—

‘together with an estimate of the target date for completion of the investigation.’

Amendment 1, page 1, line 8, at end insert—

‘(b) The Commissioner shall subsequently keep the complainant informed, as far as reasonably practicable, as to the progress of the investigation.’

Amendment 5, page 1, line 8, at end insert—

‘( ) If the reason for the delay specified in Section 2HA is lack of financial resources it shall be the duty of the Commissioner to set out the action which is being taken to remedy that lack of financial resource’.

Amendment 2, page 1, line 15, leave out ‘, and’ and insert—

‘(ba) the reasons for each of those delays, and’.

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[Mr Chope]

The new clause would simplify the Bill enormously. It would require the health service ombudsman to resolve any complaint within 12 months of the date on which it was received. As we are paying tribute to my late friend Eric Forth, may I say that the new clause would have commended itself enormously to dear Eric, because it puts on the tin what people say we want to put on the tin. With the greatest of respect to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), I think he has been timid in his Bill. We know that 99% of these cases are dealt with within one year. The new clause would require that 100% of them be dealt with within one year, and there would also be a sanction, because a breach of a statutory duty can be justiciable. That would concentrate minds. If it looked as though a complaint was being dealt with slowly, the health service ombudsman would be able to say, “You’ve got to get a move on because we’ve got a statutory duty to resolve this within one year.”

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[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman heard the comments by the Minister on the previous group of amendments but I think she addressed that point precisely. There is a complexity within the system that cannot be anticipated, and it would artificially fetter the discretion of the commissioner if an arbitrary time limit were put in place. Does he not agree that there are occasions when the complexity is such that we simply cannot fix the rigid metallic corset of a time limit on it without diminishing the value of the investigation?

[Mr Chope]

With the greatest of respect to the hon. Gentleman, I do not accept that, which is why I tabled the new clause. As he says, the Minister was addressing new clauses 1 and 2, and I would not at this stage anticipate her response to the debate we are now having on new clause 3. If a statutory duty is in place, minds will be concentrated. That means that the ombudsman would, for example, be able to explain to a complainant who it was who was not providing the information that was necessary in a timely fashion and say, “If we don’t get a move on, your complaint will be time-barred because we will dismiss it on the basis that we have a lack of evidence.”

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Following on from the point made by the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), may I say that I am not entirely sure that corsets are normally metallic—I believe they are generally made of whalebone? Leaving that aside, I wonder whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) ought to be introducing a shorter time limit, because we all know that work expands to fill the time available. [Interruption.] Parkinson’s law, indeed. As soon as a 12-month time limit is introduced, that is the time that will be taken. If 95% of complaints are being dealt with within six months, six months would seem to be quite a good limit.

[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.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It occurs to me that, for once, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) is wrong. If a public body failed to respond to the ombudsman, it should be found against and that would be quite a penalty and an incentive not to procrastinate.

[Mr Chope]

Again, my hon. Friend makes a first-class point. I hope that, when the Minister responds to this short debate, she will support the line that is being taken. We need to ensure that there is no scope for statutory bodies to avoid their responsibilities to deliver and that we facilitate the ombudsman to reach a result within 12 months of a complaint being made.

At the moment, the ombudsman is dealing with about 4,000 complaints a year, some 3,000 of which are related to health. The cost of those complaints to the taxpayer is about £4,000 a time. As the taxpayer is investing that amount of money, a reasonable return on that would be to say that those complaints should be dealt with in a maximum period of one year. If we pass new clause 3 and include it in the Bill, we will have a useful piece of legislation, instead of an empty vessel—although even an empty vessel with the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden on it will be cherished by many people, especially his constituents.

Amendment 3 is more specific. It will require the commissioner, in fulfilling the obligations set out in clause 1, to explain the delay before the end of the 12-month period, rather than after it. At the moment, there is a lacuna here—perhaps it is a deliberate one—to ensure that the minimum pressure is applied, which will show that we are just engaged in gesture politics. I hope that that is not correct. As it stands, clause 1(2) says:

“Where the Commissioner has not concluded an investigation before the end of the 12-month period…the Commissioner must send a statement explaining the reason for the delay to the person who made the complaint.”

But it does not say when the commissioner should send that statement. Unless there is a requirement on the timing of that statement, the measure is completely meaningless. It may be that that statement will be sent at the same time as the ultimate decision is made. In an effort to make the Bill do what my right hon. Friend wants it to do, which is to put pressure on the health service commissioner to deal with complaints in a timely fashion, I am suggesting a modest amendment.

Amendment 4 is on the same theme. When that statement is sent, it would not just explain the reason for the delay, but contain an estimate of the target date for completion of the investigation. I accept that, in itself, that would not be much use, because if there is another target date—it could be in another year—there may still be no remedy for the complainant. At least, though, it would force the ombudsman service to apply its mind to how much longer it thought it was reasonable for the investigation of the complaint to take.

Amendment 5 brings us into a slightly different territory. I suspect that a main reason for the delay in dealing with these complaints is a lack of resource. The amendment would add to clause 1 the words:

“If the reason for the delay specified in Section 2HA is lack of financial resources it shall be the duty of the Commissioner to set out the action which is being taken to remedy that lack of financial resource.”

Again, if the delay is due to financial reasons, it is surely important that the world outside, and particularly the complainant, should know about that so that they can make the necessary complaints. It is also important that the ombudsman is able to say, “Well, because of a lack of financial resources, I am not able to deal with these cases as quickly as I would have wished. Therefore, I am asking Parliament for more money to help us meet our case load.”

There is a £15 million budget for this exercise. Each case currently costs some £4,000 on average. The average compensation payment that was paid out in 628 cases amounts to less than £1,000. I am not sure that anyone coming from another planet and looking at this system would say that it is financially well focused. The average cost of dealing with a complaint is over £4,000. The average amount paid to a successful complainant is just less than £1,000. That shows that there is a potential problem in relation to the funding of the ombudsman service. That may be exacerbated by the ombudsman’s decision to take on more complaints for investigation by “lowering the threshold” for investigating such complaints. As the annual report makes clear, the consequence of that is an increase in the number of complaints being investigated, only a reduced proportion of which is being concluded in favour of the complainant. Expectations among the complainants are being raised, but they are not being delivered on by the ombudsman because a lot more cases are being taken on which probably should not have been taken on in the first place. The report states that because the ombudsman is

“taking on many more investigations than before, the proportion of investigations…upheld or partly upheld has inevitably declined”.

I think that the expression “inevitably declined” is a bit of an underestimate, because it has declined from 86% to 42%, which is a dramatic reduction in one year.

[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.

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[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend has achieved his wish.

I think that what is set out in amendment 5 would fall into a set pattern, with the commissioner saying every year, “Well, if you gave us a bit more money, we’d have a few more staff and things would get better.”

[Mr Chope]

With the greatest respect, I think that my hon. Friend misunderstands the amendment. The idea is to increase transparency so that rather than the commissioner being able to complain sotto voce that this is all because they do not have enough money, that would have to be brought into the open, and then the very points that he and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) have been making about the ability of many public sector organisations to get a lot more bang for their buck could be exposed to public debate.

[Mr Nuttall]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that clarification. He suggests that the amendment is purely about transparency, which means it has more merit than I had accorded it.

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[Mr Davis]

I started off being flattered by the suggestion from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) that I had been in some way seduced into mitigating the Bill, but I think that I am far beyond the point at which seduction, either metaphorical or real, is an option. Perhaps that is why, when it comes to new clause 3, which I think is the most substantive amendment in the group, I am not as much of an expert as the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) appear to be on the subject of corsets. As I understand it, corsets constrict things at one point and let them out at another. The risk in new clause 3 is that it would put such constraints on the ombudsman that problems would be created elsewhere.

There have been two problems with the operation of the ombudsman over the past few years: not meeting timetables and making mistakes. On a number of occasions the ombudsman has got things wrong, which has made things even more acutely painful for the people seeking help and support, because the ombudsman has had to go back and correct mistakes. Indeed, that happened on a number of occasions in the very case that is at the centre of this piece of legislation. Were we to go down this route, we might create a series of problems arising from the ombudsman making erroneous recommendations and proposals, which would of course lead to the issues being multiplied down the generations, rather than dealt with straightaway.

We must also remember that some of the issues that the ombudsman deals with not only require information from other Departments and other parts of Government, but sometimes involve contested arguments and may have legal liability associated with them, so we should not forget that there is a natural justice aspect to this. Finally, these issues are very often on the edge of science. The sepsis problem was one such issue, for which the medical profession is still seeking new solutions. We should be wary of going so far on this that we cause another set of problems. That is why I think the Bill as printed strikes the right balance.

[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend refers to potential legal liabilities, but my understanding is that anybody who comes before the ombudsman with a complaint has to give a guarantee that they are not intent on taking legal redress.

[Mr Davis]

I am not sure that the legal liability relates simply to the person bringing the complaint. It could relate to other people too, such as those contracting services. It also relates very much to reputation. Someone may, in effect, be asked to make a confession according to a timetable, which is not a good idea in a statute.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) in his critique of amendment 5. On amendment 4, I would leave that to practice guidelines, rather than putting it into law. It is dangerous, as I said earlier, to create lots of onerous responsibilities in law. The aim of the Bill is to exert pressure and give a degree of public guarantee, not to try to tell the ombudsman how to cross every t and dot every i.

The one amendment with which I felt some sympathy but am still uncertain about is amendment 3. I presumed from the Bill that the ombudsman’s department would respond close to the 12-month point when it knew that it might go past it. Earlier, it is likely to have to adjust the timetable; later is not tolerable. I am uncertain whether it may lead to perverse or unintended consequences if we do exactly what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has proposed. I will have to think about that. The Bill has to go through a Lords stage. I ask my hon. Friend not to press the amendment today, but I give him an undertaking that I will look at the matter closely and see if I can come up with a form of words that I can suggest as a change in the Lords; I will let him know if I am not able to do that.

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Finally, other Members have made very good points about amendment 5, which centres on investigations that take more than 12 months to conclude. My understanding is that lack of resources has played no part in any single investigation by the health service commissioner that has taken more than 12 months. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) made an interesting point about the possible unintended consequence of the insertion of a resource clause. The amendment does not pick up on an issue that we have reason to believe is a major problem, so it would not be right to legislate on it. The strength of the Bill is that it picks up on a specific identified issue of poor complaint handling by the health service ombudsman. For that reason, I hope that the amendment will not be pressed and that the Bill will proceed unamended.

[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.

[Mr David Davis]

My hon. Friend has made a minor slip. The ombudsman is not a Department; it oversees Departments, responding to and being overseen by a parliamentary Committee.

At the end of the day, my hon. Friend may have a very good point about the timing of amendment 3. If he is right, the alternative would be for me to make it very plain to the ombudsman that that is what Parliament expects. It is certainly what I expect and what I intended in drafting the Bill. Rather than jeopardise the Bill, we should make sure, as is very easy to do, that the ombudsman understands that point, as does the parliamentary Committee overseeing it, which is our final recourse.

[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend is right to say that we are talking not about a Department but about a parliamentary sponsored organisation that tries to hold the Government to account. Yesterday, the House discussed the whole saga of Equitable Life, and what a long drawn-out saga it was. We know that the ombudsman tried desperately to get timely responses from the Treasury and other Departments, and was frustrated at every turn. Looking back at that, we can see that being able to say that she had a statutory obligation to deliver the result of an inquiry within a particular period would have helped rather than hindered her in the work she had to do.

[Jane Ellison]

I completely understand my hon. Friend’s point. I tried to draw out the fact that the interests of complainants may not be served by the proposal. As we all know, serious and complex complaints sometimes involve a death or serious injury, which means dealing with a bereaved family. The course of events over the 12-month period may not run smoothly for the very people making the complaint and wanting it to be resolved sensitively, sensibly and properly. This is not about Departments or the NHS making excuses, but about acknowledging that the sensitivities of the complainants and their loved ones mean that the ombudsman needs a little more time in some instances.

[Mr Chope]

I hear what my hon. Friend says. In essence, the more usual scenario in cases of bereavement is that people want what they describe as closure sooner rather than later. The Bill has been introduced to emphasise that it is the will of the House that such matters should normally be dealt with within 12 months.

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend is wrong about one thing: the ombudsman’s power rests on trust in the accuracy of the case that he or she makes. Equitable Life’s problems did not arise from that, but from the complexities of moral hazard and other such issues. A better example was the case of the state earnings-related pension scheme, in which the ombudsman, the Public Administration Committee and the Public Accounts Committee, under my chairmanship, was able to get the Government to pay out what turned out to be billions of pounds because of errors identified from accurate—though not, as it turned out, fast—investigation. The things we must not jeopardise are the accuracy and effectiveness of the ombudsman’s investigations.

[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend gives an example of which he had direct experience. All I can say is that it is a pity that people who present their tax return late are not allowed the same indulgence—saying that their affairs are very complex, or that their accountant let them down—to avoid a penalty. There is an issue with ensuring consistency in the rules.

We have had a good run round the circuit on this matter. As in the previous debate, this again emphasises that, as Eric Forth said, Bills should never go through on the nod without proper discussion. Although people may have looked at the Bill and thought it a pretty minor piece of legislation, even such a Bill—I have not seen many that are more minor—is worthy of discussion to work through its implications. Having said that and thanked hon. Members for their contributions to this short debate, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.



Third Reading

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

I hope that I have not been too harsh on my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) in the course of this debate.

In preparing for Third Reading, I looked at the explanatory notes to the Bill. The summary states:

“The Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill seeks to increase the effectiveness of the Commissioner (known as the Health Service Ombudsman), who is the final tier of the NHS complaints system. It does so primarily by requiring the Health Service Ombudsman to take action with a view to concluding investigations of complaints within 12 months”.

The Bill does not actually do that. That is my concern. I fear that the Bill is in danger of raising expectations, because it does not require the health service ombudsman to do anything to bring forward a resolution of complaints within 12 months. All it does is to say that if she does not, she has to include references in the annual report and communicate with the complainant.

Even on the basis of the summary in the explanatory notes, I fear that the Bill falls short of the expectations of its promoter. Obviously, if we are in the business of littering the statute book with more pieces of legislation, there is no reason why this one should not be added to the others.