Clause 8 - Overview and Scrutiny Committees: Exempt Information
Health and Social Care Bill
5:15 pm
Mr Desmond Swayne (New Forest West, Conservative)
I echo what the hon. Gentleman said, but I would go further. I believe that we have the chance to review the two sets of rules under which the two bodies will operate. If the scrutiny committees operate under one set of confidentiality rules and health authorities and the NHS enjoy a much wider discretion to withhold information, a measure of suspicion is bound to grow between two bodies that we want to work to a large extent in partnership.
It strikes me that the Bill may provide an opportunity for the Government to review the issue to see whether there is a means of introducing proposals for a common set of standards for confidentiality. I suspect that there will always be the temptation, and it might be a quite legitimate concern for NHS bodies, that information that they might regard as confidential, would not be regarded as confidential within the rather narrower terms under which local government bodies operate once they had been handed over to the scrutiny committee. That might result in a reinforcing of what might be an administrative inertia to hand over information in the first place.