Clause 12
Health Bill [Lords]
11:15 am
Mike O'Brien (Minister of State (Health Services), Department of Health; North Warwickshire, Labour)
The clause expands the jurisdiction of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman as set out in the Health Service Commissioners Act 1993. It allows the ombudsman to investigate people providing services funded by direct payments for health care, but who are not health service bodies. In particular, it allows the ombudsman to investigate matters relating to commercial or other contractual transactions arising from arrangements for the provision of direct payment services. So this will not just be about maladministration; it will be somewhat wider than that, so that we can have a proper investigation of problems that arise, which may well result from legitimate disputes that come out of the provision of direct budgets to individuals.
By expanding the ombudsman’s scope in this way, we can ensure that people who receive these services have a similar degree of protection to other NHS patients. It is not identical—for example, the NHS complaints system will not apply—but this is consistent with the principle that services procured by direct payments remain NHS services. So where a third party has provided various levels of service, the NHS ombudsman would be able to look at how that third party provided those services. The ombudsman will have discretion about which complaints she wishes to investigate and we expect that she will continue to operate in a sensible and proportionate manner. Neither we nor the ombudsman expect these changes to add significantly to her work load and the ombudsman is supportive of our approach.
We are not aware of any significant resource implications, to deal with the point raised by the hon. Member for Eddisbury, but should that resource implication arise, we will listen to representations from the ombudsman to ensure that these things can be properly looked into in a proportionate and appropriate way. The resource issue is not a major one and we will look at how this develops in the future. As I have indicated, it is not just maladministration and we want to ensure that the health service ombudsman, in particular, will be able to look at matters more broadly than merely disputes between a PCT and someone who has a budget—for example, to look at how the budget was deployed by the individual. Reports from the ombudsman can help us in the longer term to evaluate how these budgets are being dealt with.