Health Protection Agency

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, transparency is one of the aims of our proposals. As regards independence, the Government will continue to rely on their scientific advisory committees, the members of which, as the noble Baroness knows, are drawn from the foremost experts in their respective fields. The fact that the scientific secretariat to each committee is provided by experts formerly within the department, instead of within the HPA, will not prevent the committees reporting as they judge to be appropriate.

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, one of the most important elements in dealing with emergencies and pandemics is the communication of accurate, concise and timely information to the community. The HPA website is a very good facility for providing information to professionals during the ordinary way of things but is not particularly good at providing emergency information to the community as a whole, nor is it adequate on its own. Will my noble friend assure me that when the public health service takes over it will concentrate on this question of emergency communication to the public as a whole?

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend makes a good point about communications. Indeed, the idea of creating a public health service is to have in the Department of Health a joined-up means of having advice, surveillance, training and planning that will then feed out to local authorities, which will be responsible for prioritising action on the ground. An essential part of that will be to get the communications right.