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NHS Redress Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 19:"Page 3, line 9, leave out paragraph (d)." The noble Earl said: This is a probing amendment that was suggested to me as a result of comments made by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister exactly what situations are envisaged by subsection (2)(d), which refers to circumstances in which proceedings under the scheme may not be commenced. One approach, as the Liberal Democrat Amendment No. 23 proposes, is to say that there should be only one situation that automatically prevents the commencement of proceedings—namely when someone has had their grievance investigated, has been made an offer and has rejected the offer. The suggestion is that it should not be open to an individual to say, ““I am sorry, I am not happy with the way the investigation was done—I want the whole matter looked into again from scratch””. One could take the opposite approach. One could say that if someone believes that an investigation was conducted poorly, without due consideration of certain factors, it should be open to him to ask for the redress scheme process to be restarted. If that were to be permitted, there would need to be safeguards to ensure that there were good prima facie grounds for revisiting the issue from scratch. There are arguments to be made for both approaches—and they may in any event not be wholly incompatible with each other. But in either event, it would be helpful to hear from the Minister what lies behind the paragraph. I beg to move.