Schedule 5 - CHAI: supplementary
Health and Social Care
10:30 am
Mr David Lammy (Parliamentary Secretary, Department of Health; Tottenham, Labour)
The amendment would place an explicit duty on CHAI to
''consult and have regard to the advice of the Children's Rights Director.''
Hon. Members will be aware that the post of children's rights director currently exists within the NCSC, and that the post holder has responsibility for ensuring proper protection for the rights and welfare needs of children accommodated in establishments regulated by the inspectorate and the Care Standards Act.
Hon. Members will also know that we intend the children's rights director to continue to perform that role, with respect to those responsibilities formerly exercised by the NCSC, under the new arrangements. We will not create a parallel post in CHAI, because the private and voluntary health care functions of the NCSC which will transfer to CHAI are not large enough to justify that role. However, as the hon. Gentleman indicated, the Bill provides wide-ranging powers to enable close co-operation between CHAI and the CSCI. That would allow CHAI, if it wished and the CSCI agreed, to ask the children's rights director to provide it with assistance and expertise in this area. The co-operation duty in the Bill is designed to accommodate circumstances such as those.
CHAI already has a duty relating to children and has to be particularly concerned about the need to safeguard and promote the rights and welfare of children when carrying out its functions. To specify how it should do that is perhaps a step too far. It clearly takes that responsibility very seriously. Effectively specifying one particular way that it should discharge that duty could mean that CHAI was unable to develop better or alternative ways of meeting its responsibility to promote the rights and welfare of children.