Schedule 1 - Constitution of public benefit corporations
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
Sir George Young (North West Hampshire, Conservative)
I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Atkinson. You will read in Hansard how a wave of excitement ran through the Committee when we heard the news of your appointment.
Before we adjourned, I was speaking to my amendment on defining the constituency for the purpose of electing a foundation trust. I posed a number of questions not from a troublesome Opposition Back-Bencher, but from the Select Committee, which examined the Bill, the Secretary of State and others and concluded that the Bill is fragmented, confusing and inequitable. The Select Committee made a clear recommendation to resolve some of the issues that I was talking about this morning. It said that
''it is imperative that the Government safeguards democracy throughout the NHS by providing a national set of guidelines specifying the rules for defining membership constituencies and the
process for managing elections so that NHS patients, and the public at large, can have full confidence in transparent and consistent standards of involvement.''
I want to know whether the Minister will be responding positively to the Select Committee's recommendation, which was couched in strong language and referred to safeguarding democracy and so on.
The Government's response so far has been to say that all the issues concerning defining constituencies is a matter for the trusts. However, the Select Committee said in its report that there is no reason why foundation trusts should be experts in community involvement. Fiona Campbell of the Democratic Health Network was quoted in paragraph 41 as saying that
''trusts have no idea of what is involved in real community engagement''.
The Select Committee made the point that they may not have a track record in community and patient engagement so far.
I am worried about all the tasks that we are imposing on foundation trust managements. They are supposed to run a quality service for the NHS, but we discovered this morning that the vehicle that they will have to drive has not been built and is still in the process of being designed. The Under-Secretary can provide no precedent for the corporate vehicle that is envisaged in the Bill. The Government will also have to push back the frontiers of democracy by finding a new way of involving people in running the NHS and inventing new constituencies.
I hope that the Under-Secretary will tell us that on the slender shoulders of the management will not be placed some of the burdens that I have described and that there will be clear guidelines. She may like to invite the Electoral Commission to shed some light on how to get that right. We have not touched on the voting process—how people will vote and so on—and we may come to that later.
I shall draw my comments to a close by saying that there is an important issue here. The Select Committee is not happy with the way in which the Government responded. I and others who have tabled amendments expect the Government to go further and we wait with mounting anticipation to hear how the Under-Secretary will respond to the case that my colleagues and I will make.