Clause 26 - Complaints about regulatory bodies
NHS Reform and Health Care Professions Bill
6:45 pm
Mr Simon Burns (West Chelmsford, Conservative)
My hon. Friend is a lawyer, so he is logical, and he is a decent and intelligent person. He would make that sort of comment because he works from the basis of knowledge, intelligence and decency. Sadly, he has obviously not had a complainant from hell. If he had fully experienced the horror of it, he would be aware that Select Committees of this House cannot investigate individual complaints.
Unfortunately, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), who is Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, has been bombarded by letters from this individual for the last three weeks. He explained in his first letter that the Home Affairs Committee, could not, by the rules laid down by the House of Commons, investigate individual complaints. To which the reply was, ''But my complaint is so important, and such an injustice has been perpetrated upon me by this House, through this person working in a health authority, that the Select Committee should investigate it.'' The woman cannot understand that there are rules for certain organisations.
My hon. Friend suggests tightening up paragraph (2)(b), but that would be to no avail in the case of someone who is so obsessive and seems to spend their life—because they have nothing better to do—reliving a seeming injustice, complaining and seeking redress. I am afraid that from a logical point of view my hon. Friend is absolutely right, but in reality with certain people in the real world it just would not work. That is why I think that we will reluctantly have to look again at amendment No. 239. We really have to get it right, because it would be irresponsible of us to inflict on this council complainants of the sort that I and many Ministers and Departments, and civil servants, over the last 12 years, have had to put up with.
Debate adjourned.— [Jim Fitzpatrick.]
Adjourned accordingly at one minute to Seven o'clock till Thursday13 December at half-past Nine o'clock.