Clause 8
Health Bill [Lords]
9:30 am
Sandra Gidley (Romsey, Liberal Democrat)
We, too, welcome the general idea of quality accounts but, to be useful, we must ensure that the information has a purpose and is not just another data collection exercise with no meaningful use. The accounts will have more credibility if the public can see that the information is put to good use. I welcome the Conservative amendments. They would widen the scope of quality accounts and make them more flexible in the future.
I want to discuss amendment 169. Before being approached by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, I had not realised that the United Kingdom used to be a world leader in injury surveillance. It had much useful data on how many people were hurt in accidents, what they were doing at the time and what products might have been involved. The data were used to analyse trends. Obviously if one is analysing trends, one should then take steps to ensure that there are no such accidents in the future.
Until 2002 the Department of Trade and Industry collected that data, but when the Department was reformed as the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—there has obviously been another reorganisation since then—the data were no longer collected. The amendment is a probing amendment to see whether there is any facility to use the quality accounts, which might be collecting some of that data anyway, to reinstate injury data collection, so that once again the UK can be at the forefront of data collection, analysis and the prevention of accidents.