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Commissioner for Older People (Wales) Bill [HL]

This group of amendments gets to the nub of the Bill, which has now clearly emerged. The commissioner does not have any power to enforce; he is not, as has been made absolutely clear, an enforcement agency. All he can really do is encourage those with responsibilities, such as local authorities, and he can also name and shame them if they defy his recommendations. Is that enough? It has been said that the Children’s Commissioner does not have enforcement powers either. In the last photograph I saw of the Children’s Commissioner, he was looking very glum because there was nothing he could do about the E.coli outbreak which affected so many children in south Wales. To quote him roughly, he said in the Western Mail that it was shameful that we could not make sure that our children were safely fed. Those who are familiar with the E.coli outbreak in south Wales would certainly agree that something pretty dreadful went wrong to result in the poisoning of so many schoolchildren. But we do not want to see the Commissioner for Older People faced in future with some ghastly situation that he could do nothing about. I am sure that I reflect the feelings of many of the agencies to which I referred earlier, such as Help the Aged and Age Concern. We are familiar with that kind of situation in Wales, where disasters—or near disasters—happen to local services sectors and nobody is there to take responsibility.