Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I would be happy to talk to the noble Lord about specialised services, and I speak as the Minister in charge of that policy area. If he would like to contact my office, I would be very glad to see him.

[Lord Crisp]

My Lords, like, I suspect, every other Member of your Lordships’ House, I very much respect the way in which the Minister has handled the Bill and his willingness to engage in debate. I sit here as a Cross-Bencher listening to what seems to be the healing of a rift between the coalition parties, if I may put it like that, but I also see—my postbag is full of this, as I am sure everyone else’s is—a rift with the medical profession, the nursing profession, midwives and others. Even though this approach may deal with some of the issues that they have wished to raise, I do not see that it will deal with the much more fundamental issue of the loss of trust and unity that seems to have been created as part of the passage of the Bill. Can the Minister say something about how he believes that that will be handled? These issues go far beyond your Lordships’ House, as we all understand.

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord is right. The stance taken by a number of medical bodies and members of the medical profession is of course a matter of great regret to me and my ministerial colleagues. I say to them and to the noble Lord that once the Bill has been approved by Parliament, as I sincerely hope it will be, that will be the time to re-engage with the medial profession and work with it to ensure that the Bill delivers on the promise that we have held out for it and that we still believe in. The principles that the Bill embodies, which the medical profession has always said that it supports, can then be given substance in the form of the improvements that we would like to see delivered to patients. From all the comments that I have heard from doctors and others who are in doubt about the Bill, most of their concerns revolve around its implementation and what it will mean in practice, rather than the principles that it enshrines. We need to look forward collectively and work together to make the NHS work better.