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Health and Social Care Bill

I think that everyone believed that that was the case until Leonard Cheshire put a question mark over it and the YL case put a lid on it. It is only since last June that we have become significantly aware of how serious the problem is and how urgent it is that we resolve it. My Committee's preference remains for the scope of the Human Rights Act to be clarified by means of a separate Act dealing solely with the wider issue of the meaning of ““public authority””. That would have the benefit of dealing with the problem of scope across the board, rather than on a piecemeal basis. It would help other vulnerable groups that are deprived of protection by the ruling, the implications of which are very broad. Such people would include tenants of housing associations and social housing, and children under special educational needs statements whose needs are met in independent schools. It would also ensure that the law in this area was consistent throughout the United Kingdom. I have brought forward my private Member's Bill again in this Session, and I urge Ministers not to delay in tackling what are, I accept, a complex range of issues. In the absence of a general solution to the problem, however, my Committee supports an interim solution for the health and social care sector, given the urgency of the issue. In our report of last summer on older people in health care and the services provided to them, we found that 21 per cent. of care homes still did not meet basic minimum standards. We set out a catalogue of abuse, neglect, carelessness, lack of privacy, dignity and confidentiality, and downright discrimination against the elderly. The elderly would be protected from all those things by the Human Rights Act, but given the implications of the YL case, those in private sector homes have no such protection under the Act. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) moved an amendment in the Public Bill Committee that would have defined all providers of health and social care as public authorities for the purposes of the Human Rights Act. The amendment had the support of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and most of the non-governmental organisations. My Committee is sympathetic in principle to the substance of the proposal. The provision of health and social care is subject to a stringent regulatory regime that involves registration, supervision and inspection. We agree in principle that that should be sufficient to attract the protection of the Human Rights Act. We are left with an anomaly of two elderly residents in the same care home: one would be protected because she was being funded by the local authority, but the other would not be protected because her assets were more than £21,500. Such a situation was pointed out by Help the Aged in its briefing for today's debate. Such an amendment, however, would extend the protection of the Human Rights Act to self-funders and would go well beyond what Parliament intended when it passed the Human Rights Act. It would raise wider questions about rights—something that has become known as ““horizontality”” in human rights jargon. We believe that such an issue—the question of whether private individuals can enforce their human rights against other private individuals or companies that are not public authorities—should be considered as part of the wider debate on the Bill of Rights. Most people do not realise that the Human Rights Act applies to public bodies, not the private sector generally. There is a strong case for horizontality, but the original Human Rights Act did not provide for that. We are simply trying to restore the position to what it was before the Leonard Cheshire and YL cases.