Professional Qualifications Bill [HL]

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister. I declare an interest as a member of the GMC board, although I will be speaking in a personal capacity on the Bill. I welcome my noble friend Lady Blake to the Front Bench and congratulate her on an excellent opening speech.

There are three points that I want to make about the Bill. First, I want to ask the Minister about its core purpose. We have been told that the Bill

“creates a new framework for the recognition of professional qualifications and experience gained overseas and takes steps to reform regulators’ practice. It will revoke and replace the interim system for professional qualifications that derives from the UK’s membership of the EU.”

We have also been told that the Bill

“is part of the Government’s plans to exercise the UK’s new regulatory flexibility”.

What is less clear is how is it to be done. We are in the dark, as my noble friend Lady Blake said.

The Minister also said that we need to remove outdated legislation. Is it the Government’s intention to streamline the approval process for professional qualifications? How does this fit with immigration law and the remit of the Home Office? The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, made some very interesting points about this and the perversity of Her Majesty’s Government’s position in relation to skill shortages.

The Bill aims to ensure the safety of service provision, provide consumer confidence and help maintain professional standards, but if they are to be maintained in the post-EU world is there a trade-off between these different objectives? In the closing remarks of his introduction to the Bill, the Minister referred to the determination of the Government to allow the autonomy of regulators to continue. That is very welcome, but how does that stand beside the Government’s wish to reform regulators’ practice? Will the Minister clear up that point?

My second point concerns the use of secondary legislation in the Bill. This is a very small Bill of 14 pages and 19 clauses, and it is littered with regulation-making powers. The core of the Bill is contained in Clauses 1 3, 4, 5 and 6, which relate to the “Power to provide for individuals to be treated as having UK qualifications”, the “Implementation of international recognition agreements”, the “Authorisation to enter into regulator recognition agreements” and the “Revocation of general EU system of recognition of overseas qualifications”. All these clauses are subject to a series of regulation-making powers. Then there is Clause 13, which is a Henry VIII clause par excellence. It essentially gives Ministers power to modify through regulations any piece of primary legislation. This has not been justified by the Government. All we have been told is that it is necessary because

“Changes would need to be integrated into the existing legislative scheme for given profession because a single approach covering all affected professions would not be ‘practicable’.”


That is not good enough.

I refer the Minister to the recent report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which during the course of the past year has become increasingly concerned about the growing tendency of the Government to introduce skeleton Bills in which broad delegated powers are sought in lieu of policy detail. As a result, in September, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, the Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee wrote to Michael Gove and Mr Rees-Mogg raising their concerns. The committees said that, even taking into account the exceptional circumstances of withdrawal from the EU and the pandemic,

“the bills which have been introduced into Parliament in response to them have been extraordinary in terms of the extent to which they have permitted a shift of power from the legislature to the executive. … It is a constitutionally fundamental issue, not only in terms of the relationship between Parliament and the executive but also more widely in terms of the relationship of trust between government and the public at large. Without substantive provision on the face of the Bill, Parliament is being asked to pass legislation without knowing how the powers conferred may be exercised by ministers and so without knowing what impact the legislation may have on members of the public affected by it.”

Mr Rees-Mogg acknowledged that, “as these are exceptional times”, such Bills,

“do not necessarily provide a model example of how Parliament would like to see legislation brought forward”

and that

“Bills with substantial powers, though sometimes essential, should not be a tool to cover imperfect policy development.”

The implication of the use of skeleton legislation is that the instruments made under it may contain substantial policy changes which would be more appropriately subject to the greater scrutiny afforded to primary legislation.

Reflecting the conclusions of its correspondence with Mr Rees-Mogg, the scrutiny committee urged the Government

“ ‘to bring forward bills that contain clear policy intention instead of broad delegated powers’ and to ensure that ‘Departments do not use the exceptional powers given to them by Parliament as an expedient in the context of the pandemic as a cloak for effecting longer term, post-pandemic changes which would more properly be included in primary legislation.’ ”

Quite. It will be interesting to see what the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has to say about the Bill when it reports shortly. In advance of its forthcoming report, I suggest to the Minister that either the Government flesh out the policy details in the Bill or the case for a sunset clause becomes very clear. I support my noble friend Lady Blake’s argument for draft statutory instruments to be published before Report.

I now turn to my third point, which is of specific concern to the GMC and other health regulators. Clause 1 gives power to the appropriate national authority—in this case, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care—to draft regulations and introduce a process that would require the GMC and other regulators to assess whether someone has a particular overseas qualification that is “substantially the same” as a UK qualification. In the case of the GMC, a person so deemed would then be eligible to practise as a doctor in the UK. This is because the GMC does not require those with UK qualifications to do anything further to demonstrate that they have the necessary knowledge and skills for registration. This could give automatic entitlement to practise to international medical graduates on the same basis as UK graduates.

Currently, the GMC has a very rigorous process for assessing whether international medical graduates are safe and fit to practise in the UK. Under this Bill, that rigorous assessment could be completely lost. It would be very difficult for an agency such as the GMC, given that it has more than 10,000 international medical graduates applying for registration each year, and it would be impossible to assess the number of qualifications from countries as diverse as India, Pakistan, Nigeria, UAE et cetera and their many medical schools. This could also affect postgraduate qualifications and the potential for those qualifications to be captured by the Bill and subsequent regulations. There is concern that the Bill as drafted could force health professional regulators to accept professionals into UK practice in a way that compromises patient safety and could have an impact on workforce supply by requiring them formally to assess thousands of qualifications in detail in order to allow professionals to practise in the UK.

The Minister said the Bill does not restrict the autonomy of regulators, although, as I have already pointed out, in the documentation accompanying the Bill the Government say it

“takes steps to reform regulators’ practices”.

We need to know what exactly the Government mean when they say that the autonomy of regulators will not be impacted. Today, the Minister said he would table an amendment before Committee to deal with this. That is welcome and I look forward to seeing that amendment, but I hope that the Minister will be able to answer on some of the more substantive issues in relation to the Bill.

Trade Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments & Ping Pong (Hansard) & Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 2nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

On other matters, maintaining standards is one of the things the British public expect of government—and it is mighty difficult, when you are involved in negotiations, not to retreat even slightly from them.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to support my noble friend Lady Thornton and to agree with my noble friend Lady Kennedy. I obviously listened with great care to what the Minister said, and the reassurance that he gave, but I hope that in winding up he will actually respond to the points raised by noble Lords. Essentially, he is asking us to take this on trust, but the problem is that, in relation to the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talked about, the same argument could be just as well used in relation to health issues.

As the BMA has pointed out, unless the health and social care sectors are specifically carved out from the scope of deals, common elements within free trade deals, such as standstill and ratchet clauses, could lock in and deepen the fragmentation of services. That could block new models of care. Other unintended effects might be to prevent NHS hospitals bringing support services back in-house, as they now seek to do.

Investor protection and dispute resolution mechanisms in UK trade deals open the door to the Government being sued for making legitimate public procurement and regulatory decisions. We heard of the Canadian example, but another is that of an EU investment treaty which resulted in the Slovakian Government being ordered to pay over €22 million in damages to a foreign private health insurance firm after they decided to reverse the privatisation of their national sickness insurance market. Investor protection mechanisms have also been extensively used to challenge public health initiatives such as plain packaging for tobacco.

I really must endorse the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, because it is exactly as she said: there are necessary interventions in health in relation to, say, issues of pricing and other things on foods that we might regard as harmful, but this can be extended to other health interventions as well. The noble Baroness talked about clever corporate lawyers, but take, for instance, the tobacco companies; globally, they fight their corner very fiercely indeed. The idea that they would use some free trade agreements to argue against some of the protections that the Government might want to put in strikes fear into my heart.

As my noble friend Lady Thornton said, we know that UK and US negotiators have had conversations about the health service. The US has also made clear its desire for the UK to change its drug-pricing mechanism. I am certainly with those noble Lords who say that trade deals could risk compromising the safe storage and processing of health data. We will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, in a moment and I will be very interested in his remarks.

In the end, this amendment cuts to the chase of the debate about whether the NHS is on the table in trade negotiations. I am convinced that it has to be taken off the table; that is the only way that we will protect it. In this short debate, frankly, we have exposed the arguments of the Minister. I say this to him: we deserve an answer, because it is no good giving bland assurances about the Government’s intent. A lot of this is about unintended consequences, with the examples there are now globally of how trade deals can impact on the sovereignty of individual national Parliaments. I will not put Brexit in at this stage, but how ironic indeed that the Government who talked about taking back control are busy agreeing trade deals where they are in fact at great risk of losing control.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is obviously a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. He told me off earlier for giving the Government a hard time. I thought about that and, in fact, until very recently, if I criticised the Government, I always offered another policy, a greener idea. I tried to be positive towards the Government, but I am afraid that my optimism is failing me. I shall come back to that.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her incredibly hard work, nudging the Government towards a more ethical stance on the protection of children. I hope that she can get them over the line. If she puts her amendment to a vote, I shall of course vote for it. The noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy and Lady Boycott, gave such good ideas and sound arguments that it is difficult to imagine that the Government can overrule them.

There is a lot in this non-regression area. I assure noble Lords, as the only Green allowed to speak in this debate today, that Greens very much support the NHS, which has done the most incredible job during the pandemic and is now doing a fantastic job of vaccinating the population.

Children, animal welfare and human rights are all very close to my heart—but I shall speak about the environment. Environmental protections are always in danger, with any government, because it is so hard to understand how you can change from where we are now to where we really ought to be, given the climate emergency that we are all facing. I hope that the Dasgupta review that has been published will help all of us to understand the threat that we face.

I welcome the review—the good thing is that it actually uses the language that most politicians use, and it looks at the economic value of nature and natural resources. Greens tend to use the phrase “natural capital”. The Dasgupta review stresses that the economy is a complete subset of the environment and not the other way around. It uses the language that growth-oriented 19th-century political perspectives can get a handle on. When it says things like, “we can’t exist without a healthy world”, that is not only about air, water and having enough pandas and elephants and things like that; natural capital includes the soil and geology—it includes everything that we are destroying very fast. That review could be a moment when all politicians make the seismic shift to understanding that it is not all about growth. Quite honestly, with the Trade Bill, you really have to have that understanding. Embedding environmental considerations into our current systems will not work; you actually have to change the systems. We have already overshot our planetary limits—we are already in huge danger, and we are still failing to meet the basic needs of billions of people all over the world.

These amendments are absolutely crucial, not only for individuals but for every part of our planet, our system and our society. I really hope that we have another massive defeat for the Government on this, so that they might have pause in their complete lack of understanding of green issues.

Trade Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 29th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I have great sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, has just said. It resonated with me as I am sure it did with others, and we must take her arguments seriously.

We in this Committee are spending a great deal of time dealing with what in the end are second-order questions, because the first-order question is: what is the driving and determining force behind the proposed legislation? I am convinced that the omissions with which we are concerned are not oversights; they are part of a deliberate policy in driving towards an unregulated and, as some would see it, free society untrammelled by the responsibilities which we have grown to take so seriously over the decades.

That is why—the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, was right about this—it is essential to have these important amendments in the Bill, so that the muscle of Parliament is backed up by what is said in the legislation. I believe that most of us right across the party divides understand that the rule of law is not just a matter of law which we must in a disciplined way follow; it is a matter of rational conclusion about how we can order our affairs, best protecting and enhancing the well-being of our people.

The conventions to which the amendments refer are vital, including the conventions covering collective bargaining. Most important are the conventions governing the rights of children, who are very vulnerable and at risk in the world as it is at the moment. The amendments talk of parliamentary sovereignty, and that is right too, but that does not mean sovereignty for Number 10 or for the backroom boys there with their ideological commitments: it means real, effective parliamentary scrutiny, which is the essential essence of sovereignty. I know that many of those on the government Benches would not dissent from the analysis that I have given, but the trouble is that we are faced with driving forces that rely on populism and that are determined at all costs to fundamentally change the nature of our society.

The problem is not just the Bill that we are considering now: noble Lords should think of what is going on at the BBC at the moment. What are we about? We are at a real moment of destiny in our country; we really have to take the gravity of the situation extremely seriously. I therefore commend the amendments in this group; the sooner we have them in the Bill, the better.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am very grateful to be able to take part in this debate. I am speaking in support of Amendment 33, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I have listened carefully to what the noble Baronesses, Lady Falkner and Lady Noakes, and the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, had to say, particularly the detailed criticism voiced by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, of the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, was clear in his opening remarks that he was prepared to rewrite and scale back the amendment, but as my noble friend Lord Rooker said, is it not the purpose of Committee stage to test out ideas, see what noble Lords think, consider the Government’s response and then refine amendments for Report? I hope that the noble Lord, Lorde Alton, will stick to his guns on this and do just that.

My noble friend referred to the Henry Jackson Society report, Breaking the China Supply Chain, which, as he said, found that 229 separate categories of goods that the UK is strategically dependent on China for our supplies. As he said, it is surely right that we must consider moving the UK away from a position in which its economic dependency can be weaponised to discourage the UK from championing human rights or a rules-based order. As he said, my particular interest is in relation to the abhorrent practice of forced organ harvesting taking place in China and the importance of ensuring that the UK is in no way complicit in supporting it.

I raised this both in the telecommunications Bill and in the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill. So far, the Government have been disappointingly slow to respond, relying on the World Health Organization’s view that China is implementing an ethical voluntary organ transplant system. That is simply not credible; it is based solely on a self-assessment by China itself.

A much more objective assessment comes from the China tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. The judgment released in March 2020 came to the conclusion that forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and Falun Gong practitioners have been one—probably the main—source of organ supply. In regard to the Uighurs, the tribunal had evidence of medical testing on a scale that could allow them, among other uses, to become an organ bank. Adidas, Nike, Zara and Amazon are among the western brands currently benefiting, according to a coalition of civil society groups, from the forced labour of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. A shipment recently seized by US Customs and Border Protection in July included wigs made from human hair, which is hugely concerning, considering many reports and personal testimonies of female Uighur Muslims having their hair forcibly shaved in the camps.

EU Coronavirus Vaccine Programme

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I can confirm to my noble friend that we have had discussions with many countries, including those who formed the Inclusive Vaccines Alliance. It is our understanding that the alliance members have now joined the EU procurement initiative, with commercial negotiations being taken forward under that framework. However, as I have said, we will continue to work with the EU and other international partners on development.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister has been keen to acknowledge the benefit of international collaboration. If a number of vaccines are successfully produced, one of the great challenges we face is that a significant proportion of people will not take them. Will he at least talk to the EU about collaborating on a European-wide effort to encourage our populations to take up the vaccine?

Covid-19: Businesses and the Private Sector

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, in parallel to the magnificent efforts of the NHS and other parts of the public sector, we have seen a fantastic response from the private sector but, disappointingly, there are examples of where the Government have seemed reluctant to respond to offers of help. I particularly commend those engineering and manufacturing companies that have shifted their production processes to assist in the manufacture of ventilators. Then there are staff in the health devices industry who are clinically trained, who have returned to the NHS at their employer’s expense. There are pharmaceutical companies at the forefront of efforts, with universities, to develop vaccines while still securing the essential supply of medicines.

Alongside this, there have been a number of puzzling examples of the failure to embrace the potential of more such partnerships. In March, when the decision was made to withdraw community testing and tracing due to lack of capacity, why were businesses, universities and research institutes not asked to help? Why were dozens of UK companies that responded to the Government’s request to switch production to PPE ignored? And why did the Government not embrace the Covid-19 symptom tracker—developed by researchers at King’s College London and the health data science company ZOE—which has 3.6 million people contributing information?

Finally, why have the Government insisted on developing their centralised contact tracing app, which is in difficulty at the moment, as opposed to the decentralised model developed by Apple and Google? I fear that this kind of go-it-alone preciousness has been characteristic of the Government’s approach to the crisis, with a failure to learn from international experience and delay in taking decisive action. We must see better in the future.

Self-employment Income Support Scheme

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 5th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

The Chancellor has referred to this difficulty a number of times. We are satisfied that the system as it currently operates is the best one at the moment, but as I said in response to an earlier question, we keep all these things constantly under review and will reflect on what the noble Viscount has said.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister at least accept that many self-employed and freelance people are falling through the net because of the criteria that the Government have set? Will he reconsider his answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins? The Money Advice Trust is getting so many self-employed people calling in who are desperate because they do not meet the criteria. It is surely an excellent idea to have a hardship fund administered by local authorities to help them out.

[Lord Callanan]

We already have a number of schemes in place. The SEISS will benefit something like 95% of all claimants, but of course such schemes have been introduced at pace. Officials are still working on it, and I and the department will reflect closely on what the noble Lord has said. We want to ensure that as many people as possible are helped during these difficult times.