Clause 3
Health Bill [Lords]
5:00 pm
Mike O'Brien (Minister of State (Health Services), Department of Health; North Warwickshire, Labour)
I begin by reassuring the hon. Member for Romsey that the constitution and the handbook will be, and are, readily accessible to patients, public and staff. The constitution is available in a number of alternative formats in addition to translations in 11 languages. It is available in Braille, large print and audio format, and there is an easy-to-read version that can be used by children and those with learning disabilities. The handbook is available in Braille to those who request it. Those formats are available through the internet, over the phone and by post. NHS bodies have also accessed the hard copies of the document, and are being supported by the Department of Health in promoting the constitution locally. We fully intend to keep the formats, so there is no need to put that in the Bill. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 already requires public authorities to take reasonable steps to provide disabled people with an auxiliary aid if that would facilitate the receiving of any benefits. I believe that further duties are unnecessary.
The point that the hon. Lady reasonably makes is that we may have legislation, but it is not always delivered in practice. I accept that, but the original legislation must be enforced rather than compounding the problem by saying that it was not always enforced when it should have been under the 1995 Act, so we will repeat it. That does not resolve the issue. The way to resolve it if the law is not being complied with—this does not seem to be the case—is to enforce the existing law. We should not pretend that we can do something just by repeating the same effect in new legislation.
Law making and law enforcement are different, and the option of using the law subsequently to ensure that organisations enforce previous legislation is available to citizens and various representative organisations such as RNIB. It is therefore right that they should use the existing legislation and the new equalities legislation when appropriate to ensure that the various pieces of information are available in the necessary forms. Repeating it in subsequent legislation—we could do that in every piece of legislation—is not the way forward. We have generic legislation, and it should be used.
I submit that the NHS constitution is available in the ways that the hon. Lady hopes, and I hope that she accepts that we agree that it should be readily available in the appropriate format for people who need it. I believe that it and the handbook are available in those various forms.