Clause 2
Health Bill
12:15 pm
Sandra Gidley (Romsey, Liberal Democrat)
I was not going down the liability road at this stage. Patients must have faith in the constitution. They may look at their handbook, realise that certain things are supposed to happen and complain to the trust, at which point the trust can easily say, “We’ve had regard to this aspect of the constitution. We’ve got policies in place. It was a failure by a member of staff.” That weakens the document considerably, because there is not really a right to redress and there is no aspiration to learn from the failures of the system. It seems that the trusts can, as long as they have all the right bits of paper, quite easily wriggle out of responsibility with regard to delivering what is in the constitution. We could spend all day thinking up similar examples, but I was merely trying to qualify where the buck stops and who had responsibility where.
A simpler answer would be to support amendment 108, under which the Secretary of State could issue guidance on this matter. I wonder whether this potential provision could be reviewed in some way in future, because although the Secretary of State may feel that he does not need it now, if there are problems with the constitution at a later date, it would be a shame to have missed an opportunity to provide a remedy.