Health and Care Bill

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Tuesday 18th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for bringing these amendments before the Committee today. I am also grateful to all noble Lords, who have offered me two bits of advice thus far: first, “You can make your life a lot easier if you just accept our amendments”; and secondly, “Don’t worry about the other amendments, just accept mine; that’s who needs to be on the board”. I hope all noble Lords understand the sort of advice I have been given, as I consider my response.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, raises an important point and there is clearly understanding and support for ensuring that there is primary care representation on ICBs. This is a topic that we have both discussed and are likely to return to. I am in danger of sounding like a scratched record, for those who remember vinyl—I am told it is making a comeback—but I hope not to, or to labour the point too much, by repeating the arguments we have already discussed at length.

We fully agree that the membership of ICBs should include individuals from a number of places and this is why we have set a requirement that ICBs should have at least one member nominated by the primary medical care providers on the board. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made a couple of very useful points here. The board should have available to it the talent and skill sets that it needs, but there should also be a balance that does not overwhelm any one set of skills. That is one of our concerns as we look at not overprescribing the make-up of the ICBs.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, is absolutely correct that, given the debates we have had up to now, there will have to be more discussions on the ICBs between this stage and the next. I accept that; we will have meetings and roundtables to discuss this, and I know there might well be more amendments on the membership of the ICBs. Before those discussions, I would just reiterate at this stage that this is a floor, not a ceiling; it is a minimum requirement. ICBs are able to appoint individuals with those skills as they see fit, and we would hope that they would, to make sure that they meet the health requirements and tackle the health challenges of the local areas they cover. As the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe said last time we discussed these issues, it is important not to be overprescriptive and close off the opportunities to tailor boards to each local area. The noble Lord spoke very eloquently about his experience of building a board in a particular place, which might have been quite different, had it been in another place.

Turning to Amendment 41B, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, raised an important point about ensuring there is sufficient representation of clinicians with experience of public health and secondary care. We fully agree that ensuring that sufficient clinical expertise is available to the ICB is critical. We do so through a duty imposed on ICBs to seek advice from persons with a range of professional expertise in, for example, prevention, which noble Lords have said we should focus on, diagnosis or treatment in illness, and the protection or improvement of public health. This applies at every level of the ICB and impacts how it discharges its functions. As a result, I can assure the Committee that the clinical voice will be heard loud and clear at every level—not just at the ICB or ICP level, but in the health and well-being boards.

For the reasons I have discussed, I am afraid that I do not agree at this stage that the best way to ensure this would be by requiring two additional members of the ICB. This would take away the flexibility provided to ICBs and potentially inhibit their ability to respond to their own area’s local needs. Finally, I would not want to risk ICBs believing that their duty to seek clinical advice would be discharged solely by appointing two clinicians to their board—saying, “Okay, we have those two clinicians, that box is ticked”. The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, made a point about a staff member called Gladys, whose role ticked a box. We have to be very careful that we do not repeat that mistake with two tick boxes. Instead, ICBs should seek appropriate advice from subject matter experts. This may mean seeking advice from different clinicians for different issues and developing different models of seeking advice for different types of decision.

As I said earlier, we will have discussions about the whole ICB composition between this stage and the next. In that spirit, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, will be a little reassured and feel able to withdraw her amendment.