Earl Howe: My Lords, today, as the Minister said, we shall be concentrating our gaze on health issues and on home affairs. In the process we shall have the pleasure of listening to no fewer than seven distinguished maiden speakers. The gracious Speech brought us, as is customary, a mixed plateful of the reasonably edible and barely digestible. And taken together, it is a giant helping. Whereas the...
Earl Howe: My Lords, I am not in a position to confirm that before we have a chance to debate it. As the noble Lord knows, we have debated the issue on a number of occasions and that question remains decidedly open. The sad thing about the gracious Speech is what is not included in it. Last year, many of us felt that the Health Bill--now the Health Act--represented a giant missed opportunity. It focused...
Earl Howe: My Lords, in answering a supplementary question, the noble and learned Lord indicated that the practice of not voting down secondary legislation was a matter of constitutional convention. Would he care to correct that phraseology slightly? My understanding is that there is nothing constitutional about it; it is merely a result of an agreement between the parties. To that extent, it is merely...
Earl Howe: My Lords, on behalf of noble Lords on these Benches I should like to express my thanks to the Minister for his very clear and helpful introduction to this Bill. It is a Bill that we greatly welcome. Ten years ago the passing of the Children Act represented a landmark in the level of legal protection afforded to young people. The Children (Leaving Care) Bill extends and brings up to date the...
Earl Howe: My Lords, the House has reason to be grateful to the Minister, for the second time in less than a week, for a lucid and balanced explanation of an important Bill. This Bill, though, unlike the one that we debated last Tuesday, scans a particularly wide horizon. It concerns itself not with a restricted range of public services provided to a small though deserving minority, but rather with the...
Earl Howe: My Lords, I was not suggesting that such factors did not matter but that they should not be the be all and end all of any assessment of how good or bad was the level of care in a particular establishment. Of course I acknowledge the noble Baroness's points.
Earl Howe: My Lords, is it not the case that the much publicised new money that the Government announced for the NHS will be largely swallowed up over the coming two years by cost pressures that cannot be avoided? Will the Minister confirm, for example, that additional pension contributions alone are set to absorb an extra £650 million over that period? That is on top of the huge costs arising from new...
Earl Howe: I rise to speak to Amendments Nos. 11 and 18 in my name and to support strongly the observations of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. The Government are in a terribly complicated muddle over the regulation of private healthcare. The delivery of healthcare in this country does not issue forth from two conveniently separate channels, one labelled "public" and the other "private"; it is not as...
Earl Howe: I am grateful to the Minister for clearing up much fog and uncertainty that have descended upon the issue. He has done so extremely clearly. We have had a helpful short debate and at the appropriate time I shall not move my amendments.
Earl Howe: My Lords, from these Benches, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. At the outset, I pay tribute to the nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals throughout the country who are devoting their efforts so assiduously to the care of patients with influenza. It is a period of great pressure in many hospitals and at times like these we are glad to rely on the skill and...
Earl Howe: I rise to speak to Amendment No. 15, which stands in my name. The amendment is identical in spirit to Amendment No. 12, to which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has just spoken, although, with all respect to him, the wording of that amendment reads a little oddly as it suggests that the relevant home-based healthcare is provided in the home of the nurse or doctor, which of course is not...
Earl Howe: I support the amendments. I speak in particular to Amendments Nos. 45, 53, 65 and 151. In the first instance, some of us approached the Bill in a state of high expectation only to find that it has a number of gaping holes, one or two of which have been mentioned. However, one of the most serious is the absence of any duty on the part of the national care standards commission to monitor...
Earl Howe: In speaking to this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 87, 98, 99, 100, 112, 113 and 114 which are all grouped with this amendment. First, I fully endorse everything which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has just said. During the passage of the Health Bill last year, my noble friend Lord McColl argued persuasively for better and fuller safeguards against breaches of medical...
Earl Howe: I am grateful to the Minister. I shall reflect carefully on what he has said as regards the confidentiality of foster and adoptive parents. However, I do not believe that he has covered the point I was seeking to make about children. I cannot think of any situation in which the identity of a child should be disclosed to the general public. Of course, there are circumstances when the name of a...
Earl Howe: I support these amendments, two of which, Amendments Nos. 33 and 64, are in my name. I should like to focus my remarks on complaints in the context of private hospitals. The key point is that it is not enough for each independent hospital to have its own formal complaints procedure although I do not in any way belittle its importance. The complaints procedure should be a standard, recognised...
Earl Howe: I can be brief. I rise simply to endorse everything that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has said. When we debated the then Health Bill on 17th June last year, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, in relation to the document entitled Regulating Private and Voluntary Healthcare, "the consultation document does, however, acknowledge that a regulator might wish to contract with another...
Earl Howe: In that case, why did the Government's consultation document specifically invite views on the possibility of the regulator contracting--as I quoted--with another body such as the Commission for Health Improvement? If they were not serious about that proposal, why did they invite views on it?
Earl Howe: I have a question about fees. How will the funding streams for the social care and the independent healthcare sectors operate? Will money received from each sector be ring-fenced so that there is no cross-subsidy between the social care sector and the independent healthcare sector?
Earl Howe: Before we finish this group of amendments, perhaps I may ask the Minister a further question. It is prompted by the pertinent observations of my noble friend Lord Jenkin and relates in particular to Wales. What mechanisms will be put in place to prevent the Welsh Assembly from, as it were, using this provision to create an additional income stream and charging fees that do not relate in any...
Earl Howe: moved Amendment No. 38: Page 5, line 23, leave out ("of any description").
