Clause 10
Health Bill [Lords]
2:45 pm
Stephen O'Brien (Shadow Minister, Health; Eddisbury, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment 122, in clause 10, page 6, line 34, leave out ‘annulment’ and insert ‘approval’.
Thank you, Mr. O’Hara. We move to clause 10, which deals with more regulations under clause 8. The premise of amendment 122 is simple: the House should be given the opportunity to debate the regulations proposed in clause 8 regarding the form and content of the quality accounts. Presently, the regulations will be introduced into the Bill by way of a statutory instrument that the House will have the opportunity to annul. If we were given the chance to debate the regulations through approval of the secondary legislation rather than annulment, the Government could benefit from the views of the House on the scope and content of their regulations.
Without sight of the regulations, it is impossible to ascertain whether quality accounts will be rigorous and objective enough to paint an accurate picture of a trust’s services, or indeed the quality of those services. Although we endorse the notion and principle of quality accounts, we have not yet been given the opportunity to scrutinise the detail of the proposal. The regulations would raise a number of issues for debate, such as the circumstances in which the Secretary of State might exempt a trust from producing a quality account and the extent to which the regulations provide for an objective account of quality based on outcomes. In previous debates, we have certainly touched on the former, and the Minister, in responding to a previous proposed amendment, stated that the Secretary of State would have the power to exempt a trust from producing a quality account.
I think that the Government have in mind very small suppliers of NHS services who might find that producing quality accounts is neither proportionate nor particularly relevant to the service supplied. We must be extraordinarily careful that that cannot be used to exempt from producing quality accounts pioneer technological suppliers or those at the riskier end of providing services to the NHS, as more innovative suppliers can often be. If quality accounts are not produced, there would at least have to be no expectation that quality assurance—or the requirement for patient safety, of course—would be lessened by the granting of the exemption. It is easy enough to imagine a small operation for which it would be disproportionate or a terribly minor part of an overall service given, but we need some reassurance that the measure is not a potential way to get out of the obligation to produce quality accounts.
As with so much of the Bill, we do not have the draft secondary legislation or the proposed detail of the quality accounts. We have some examples, but the Minister rightly observed that that is not what is expected in the final iteration and analysis. The amendment would therefore be helpful in giving the Government, and indeed the House, the opportunity to take a view on whether the approach is working well, rather than simply using the process of annulment.