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Health and Social Care Bill

I suspect that this Committee is more or less at the stage where everything has been said but not everyone has as yet got round to saying it, so I shall try to be brief. I bring to this matter my experience of trying to work with departments in local authorities that have merged and, in the very different field of policing, of trying to produce an integrated service across a range of different policing tasks. There must be clarity of purpose for this new body so that everyone engaged can refer back at regular intervals to what they are there to perform and what they are trying to achieve. The point was very well put that it is also helpful if the users of the ultimate service and those who are regulated are aware of that clarity of purpose. Similarly, if seamlessness is to be achieved, it is important that those standards and purposes are applied to all the various sectors. That is what motivated me to table Amendments Nos. 12 and 13, although that is not to say that I disagree wholeheartedly with some of the other amendments. The Government need to be aware of the extraordinary strength of feeling that exists that the new regulator requires a clear set of objectives and a clear set of purposes; otherwise, it will not be able to succeed. Unless the breadth of that responsibility is set out, the danger is that the regulator will in practice start to focus on narrow areas or will move from one area to another, depending on the public pressures that may have arisen in the immediate short term. Returning to the policing comparison—it may not be immediately apparent but there is a very clear comparison—when there are problems of serious or organised crime or terrorism, the police are urged to put all their resources into that area. When the consequence of that is that the rate of so-called low-level crime increases, the police are urged to put their resources into that, and the result is that they move from one extreme to the other. The real danger is that the new regulator will operate in the same way. There will be some appalling scandal in a social care establishment and social care will become the current issue, which may mean that acute care or community services are not looked at in the way that they should be. This should be done holistically, with a clear set of objectives and purposes. I have heard two sets of arguments as to why amendments along the lines of those that we are considering are not necessary. The first is that everything is here in the Bill but we have not appreciated that Clause 2 covers all the points; the other is that we should not specify matters too much, otherwise, as changes occur and the nature of provision changes, the regulator will be left with a fossilised set of objectives. However, apart from the fact that those are two contrasting and conflicting reasons as to why some change is necessary, the reality is that all these amendments are couched in terms that will enable the new commission to respond to the changes in care patterns that will no doubt arise over the years. If—and it is a big if—the objectives in Clause 2 encompass all the points that we want, it is a very poor example of parliamentary drafting. The objectives and functions of the regulator are set out for other regulatory bodies—the noble Earl, Lord Howe, referred to Ofcom and the Food Standards Agency, and we have heard about Ofsted—but a Bill setting up a body with the dreadful name of ““Oftenant””, which is shortly to come before your Lordships’ House, is a model of clarity for the way in which its regulatory objectives are spelt out. No one needs to be a lawyer; any individual tenant will be able to pick up the objectives and understand the responsibility and focus of the new regulatory body. I do not know whether there is an A team or a B team in parliamentary drafting, but I suggest that comparisons should be made with the drafting that has been carried out for other regulatory bodies before we come back to this issue on Report. On the proposal to leave out Clause 2(4), I understand the arguments about independence but there is no point in a regulatory body which does not take some account of the framework of the government policy in which it is operating. It must move within the grain of government policy, but that does not mean that it must always agree with it. It may well be that the words here are not the best form of parliamentary drafting but it would be wrong to omit any reference to government policy. It is important that any regulatory body should make at least some recognition of the governmental environment in which it is operating and tender its advice as a part of that.