Clause 9
Health Bill [Lords]
2:00 pm
Stephen O'Brien (Shadow Minister, Health; Eddisbury, Conservative)
In support of my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead, the amendment is probably informed by the fact that those of us who share the privilege of being shadow Health Ministers find that much of the difficulty of furnishing ourselves, as would be expected, with the information that helps us to scrutinise and hold the Government to account arises from the fact that so much information is held not at ministerial level or even departmental level, but at SHA and trust level. Very often, we have found that asking written parliamentary questions has not enabled us to elicit that information, particularly on all the various accounts that relate to the wide panoply of trusts. As a result, freedom of information requests have tended to be the methodology used and, as the Minister is well aware, that is a very time-consuming and burdensome operation. What lies behind the amendment is the desire to short-circuit some of the hard slog that is needed just to make the information available, as any proper Opposition should be doing to hold any Government to account.