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Older People's Rights (Health Care)

The hon. Gentleman is right, and I proposed amendments to that effect, which I might mention in a few moments. The health and social care inspectorate—currently the Healthcare Commission— and the Commission for Social Care Inspection are important in ensuring that health care providers respect and promote human rights. We were critical of the Healthcare Commission for regarding the Human Rights Act as just one of a large number of regulations to which it is subject. The Human Rights Act is fundamental to the work of the commission, and should be used explicitly in its regulatory work. The Government response pointed to a recent report by the commission, ““Caring for dignity””, which included the commitment to ensure that dignity and human rights are the underlying principles that inform the work undertaken by the commission. Things have moved on since our report, and the Bill to merge the inspectorates into the new Care Quality Commission has passed through the House and is in the other place. We published two reports on the Health and Social Care Bill. The first set out amendments to the Bill to take account of some of the recommendations in our report, which we debated on Report a few weeks ago. Our main concern is to ensure that the Care Quality Commission adopts a human-rights based approach to its work and that human rights are reflected in the care standards that will be issued by the Department. The Minister was not persuaded that human rights should be one of the factors of which the CQC should take account in its work, and he said that the commission will be subject to the Human Rights Act. In our view, the Government are again missing the point. There is ample evidence to show that health care bodies are not taking their commitments under the Human Rights Act sufficiently seriously. It has taken several years to persuade the Healthcare Commission that human rights should be a central element of its work, rather than simply being one of the many legal requirements that it must meet. The CQC will be in the same position unless the Government act now to accept our recommendation to insert a reference to human rights into the factors that the CQC must take into account. We are not convinced that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is doing enough to take human rights into account in its decision making. That is particularly important in relation to difficult decisions about the availability of treatments for older people. We call for NICE to demonstrate in all its work that it takes into account convention rights as required by the Human Rights Act.