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Health and Social Care Bill

My hon. Friend the Minister may know that I have been to visit the Minister with responsibility for care homes with a delegation from Unison, and we expressed concern about the risk-based approach to inspection. I know that my hon. Friend gave assurances about this in Committee, but there are ongoing concerns. If, in time, there are cases of care homes where the lighter-touch inspection has led to a lowering of standards of care, or the sense that they will no longer be visited so frequently and therefore do not need to perform quite so well, that could eventually lead back to the Government's door. My hon. Friend is conscientious and concerned about these matters, but this could come back to haunt the Government unless it works. We have already had reports in the past couple of weeks about care homes where there have been serious infections or the inspection was not sufficient to ensure that they had performed well. While I accept my hon. Friend's sincerity about the matter, some will continue to have concerns about the light-touch approach and the risk-based inspection system. This may have to be revisited in future unless it works as well as he suggests.