Clause 8 - Amendments of Constitution
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
8:55 am
Ms Hazel Blears (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (public health), Department of Health; Salford, Labour)
We covered a great deal of this ground in previous debates about the relationships between the minimum frameworks set out in schedule 1 and the rights of local organisations to come up with a constitution that is robust, vigorous and fully representative of the community. I should like to reinforce our commitment to ensuring that such constitutions are properly set out.
Clause 8 rightly provides for NHS foundation trusts to change their constitutions. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, Central (Mr. Jones) has talked about the need for flexibility; the geographical areas to which foundation trusts provide their services may well change, so trusts would need to be able to vary the boundaries of their public constituencies. Also, new services may be taken on, in which case the partner organisations that are to be appointed under paragraph 12(2) of schedule 1 may need to vary or take on more PCT representatives, if they provide services in a different geographical area. In other words, we can certainly contemplate circumstances in which the constitutions might need to change.
Before any application is approved by the Secretary of State and by the independent regulator, we expect provision to be made for possible changes in the constitution, and related powers of the various constituent parts of the NHS foundation trust to be defined.
The hon. Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns) raised an important point about the need to get the checks and balances right in this new form of democratic public benefit corporation, so that we know who has the power to introduce changes and how those changes can be endorsed. At this stage, we do not want to prescribe numbers in the Bill, or to be inflexible about how that change might come about. However, I am happy to record that we want the constitutions to contain robust provision for flexibility when circumstances change and to ensure, as the hon. Member for West Chelmsford said, that no special interest group can move changes to the constitution for its own sake.