Clause 23 - Failing NHS foundation trusts
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
6:30 pm
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon, Conservative)
This will be a brief point in an attempt to be helpful. When I first read the clause, I thought that I misread it, so I reread it several times. I thought that it was trying to say something that it is not trying to say; that when a regulator has the opportunity to serve a notice on a hospital trust, he should first serve a notice specifying the breach and giving a reasonable period in which the breach should be rectified. Only then could the regulator move on to use some of the more draconian and incisive powers in the clause.
However, the clause, as I now read it, says that if the regulator believed that a foundation trust was contravening some of its terms and conditions or trust authorisation, he could move straight to serving a notice to remove all board directors and impose interim directors. That might be the appropriate action, but it might also be heavy-handed and too precipitate. Would it not be better to build into the clause an obligation on the regulator to serve a notice to specify the breach and give the trust the opportunity, within a reasonable time frame, for that breach to be rectified before he can move on to the step of intervention as detailed in the clause?