Clause 46 - Care Trusts where directedpartnership arrangements
Health and Social Care Bill
12:15 pm
Sir George Young (North West Hampshire, Conservative)
We now move to clause 46 where, once again, the Minister will have to find some fresh vocabulary to explain why we are proceeding with care trusts. We have heard a great deal about voluntary arrangements, no compulsion and equal partners. That may well have been valid for clause 45, but it is not valid for clause 46, which provides that the Secretary of State can move in and impose a care trust. So we can now say goodbye to Mr. Hyde and hello to Dr. Jekyll because this is perceived as a punishment. It is difficult to see how a care trust can be both a reward for good behaviour and a punishment for bad behaviour. All we know about clause 46 and the circumstances in which it will be invoked is first, that the authorities involved did not want to enter into an arrangement voluntarily, and secondly, that something has gone wrong. Against that background of an unwillingness to work together and something going wrong, it seems heroic for the Secretary of State to move in and impose a new arrangement that is as yet untried, and about which we have had a full debate.
The import of amendment No. 260 is to narrow the circumstances in which the Secretary of State can intervene by deleting the words ``any of''. The current wording of the Bill suggests that if a local authority failed to exercise any of its health related social service functions adequately, the Secretary of State could move in and impose a care trust structure. Such a direction could result from a difficulty with a single aspect of an individual service. This is very draconian given that there is no requirement on the Secretary of State to give the authority the opportunity to remedy the problem. I hope that the Secretary of State will agree that the clause 46 solution should be applied only when everything else has failed and attempts have been made to solve the problem is in more conciliatory ways than by the imposition of a care trust. The Minister could begin to allay some of the concerns about clause 46 if he indicated the circumstances in which the functions had failed, whether the evidence that substantiated that view would be in the public domain, and whether it would have to be underpinned by independent professional opinion.
It might help inform the rest of our debate on clause 46 if, in his response to amendment No. 260, the Minister could say a little more about what might trigger such a draconian remedy with all the consequences for local democratic accountability that would flow from it.