Clause 6
NHS Redress Bill [Lords]
5:00 pm
John Baron (Shadow Minister, Health; Billericay, Conservative)
Those figures are completely spurious and I sincerely ask the Minister to check them with his civil servants. The bottom line is that the cost of investigation is fixed and inevitable; the issue is who carries out the investigation.
If we are simply deciding on the change regarding who will carry it out to ensure that there is independence, how does the Minister get the figure of £41 million when all we are saying is that the person at the top should be independent and should replace the person whom the Minister no doubt envisages?
I ask hon. Members to bear it in mind that fact finding is essential to fault finding, and that under the Government’s proposals the fact-finding stage will have to be gone through anyway before the point of determining liability is reached. All we are saying is simplify the scheme by restricting it to fact finding, but ensure its independence by having redress investigators. How can that add £41 million?