NHS Redress Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
John Baron (Shadow Minister, Health; Billericay, Conservative)
I also welcome you to the Chair, Miss Begg, and I look forward to your chairing the Committee as it proceeds. I thank the Minister for his kind words. As for the football arrangements and whether they were a matter of planning or good luck, I suggest that they were one of planning on our side, and good luck on his, but the bottom line is that we have got there anyway.
I shall say a few words of overview of the Bill. It stands as we like it, as the Committee knows. I thank their lordships, in particular my noble Friend Earl Howe on behalf of my party and Baroness Barker and Baroness Neuberger, who speak for the Liberal Democrats, for their amendments, as a result of which we have a much improved Bill before us. Our position is clear: we would like it to be left as it is, because we believe it to be far improved from when it was first brought to the House of Lords in October.
The Minister talked about consensus, of which there was a great deal on Second Reading. The Government know that the Opposition support their attempts to address the problem of clinical negligence litigation. The process is currently complex, costly and long drawn-out. Most clinical negligence cases are funded by legal aid, yet most fail, at great expense to the NHS and the taxpayer. That money could better be directed towards patient care. However, most people do not qualify for legal aid, so they want a credible and independent alternative to going to court. The NHS redress scheme could offer that alternative. The fundamental divide between us and the Government is that, whereas the Secretary of State and the Minister envisage a scheme that would effectively make the NHS judge and jury in its own cause, we believe that investigation of what has gone wrong in a case ought to be separated from the process of the NHS assessing its own liability and making an offer.
What is more, the investigative process must be independent, like the coroners’ courts and the system provided by the Inquiries Act 2005. As the Government intend to reverse our key amendments made in the Lords, I shall ask the Minister to justify removing from the new scheme the essential feature of independence, which has the support of the Law Society and Action against Medical Accidents. I shall also ask him to explain both how his arrangements will create independence and the costs that he has attributed to our scheme, which seem to be the Government’s only main argument against it. They suggest that increased costs are the reason why we should not proceed with the Bill in its present form.
As can be seen from our amendments, I intend to focus on the key parts of the Bill, particularly clauses 6 and 12. Their lordships did an excellent job through their probing amendments, and the arguments that were made are on record, so I do not see why we should repeat them here. I hope that the Minister will be generous in taking interventions so that we can have a meaningful debate, to which I look forward.