Schedule 1 - Constitution of public benefit corporations
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
11:15 am
Ms Hazel Blears (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (public health), Department of Health; Salford, Labour)
They are beginning to gain some experience and expertise. I freely admit—we said so on Tuesday—that this is a new venture, and a new journey that we are asking people to make. Together with the freedoms and flexibilities of an NHS foundation trust comes the connection with local communities, and these will require new skills.
We talked about the support that the centre can offer, because we recognise that we cannot simply ask the new trusts to do it and leave them in a vacuum. That is not our intention at all. It is very clear that freedom and flexibility come with local accountability. They are two sides of the same coin and are crucial to success.
The external reference group, which I have already mentioned, contains a range of people with a great deal of skill and experience in good governance. We are drawing up a source book that the trusts will be able to use. The NHS regularly draws up tool kits on good guidance and practice so that people are not reinventing the wheel. We do not want every single NHS foundation trust to have to start from scratch in terms of governance. There is now a good body of governance experience, not just from the Government but from a whole range of organisations.
We recently set up the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health as a result of the Health and Social Care Act 2001. That body is now up and running, and is charged with a specific statutory requirement to come up with protocols, training, support and guidance to make sure that public involvement right across the NHS, in terms of fulfilling the statutory duty under section 11 of the Act, meets those very high standards of public involvement that we also want to see reflected in the NHS foundation trusts.