---

Health and Social Care Bill

I approach the amendments from a different perspective from that of other Members of the Committee. I own up to being the Minister responsible for the policies, although only for six months in the second half of 2006, when I was roped in to try to tackle some of these areas. This is an extremely complicated area and a difficult one; it is not an easy area in which to formulate policy. However, it is with some sadness that I support the main amendments in this group. We must listen to the volume of concern that has been expressed about the absence of something like these amendments at the beginning of the Bill about the objectives of the regulator. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, said that we do not want to be back here in five years’ time. In fact, it was only about five years ago that the noble Earl and I were dealing with these issues in debates on the 2003 legislation. Five years seems to be about the time it takes to come back to this kind of issue. It is rather sad that we need something of this ilk and that the Bill has been allowed to progress as far as it has without this issue being addressed. It did not need to be like that. When we looked at the policy in 2006, Patricia Hewitt and I made it very clear that we needed to look at other regulators. Indeed, we brought in the chairman of Ofcom to help us with the design of some of these issues. He chaired a small group for us to help us identify some of the issues that we had to tackle. Ofcom is a good model of how to set out in legislation what is required of a regulator. I am sure that my noble friend has his briefing on the strengths of Clause 2. I do not blame him for having that briefing; he was not the Minister responsible for this policy area. But as someone who has been there and got the T-shirt, I gently say to him that Clause 2 does not do the job. It simply does not meet the requirements of a regulator. The three things that you need to do in a framework Bill, if you are to satisfy Parliament and the public, is to be clear about the purpose, functions and scope of a body. The Bill does not yet do that job. There are uncertainties about the scope, which we will come to later; there are definitional problems in Clauses 4 and 5, to which I have put down amendments and which we will debate later. However, those definitions are linked into the objectives to the regulator. We cannot get into that detail until we are clear about the regulator’s purpose. I am sure that there are probably ways in which the wording of the amendments could be improved. All Members of the Committee have indicated a willingness to be flexible about the precise wording, but something of the kind of what is in the main amendments that we are debating needs to be met. It is very difficult to argue, as the Government are trying to do, that the devil will always be in the detail of regulation and to say, ““Trust us. We just need a framework Bill””. I accept that we were always likely to have a framework Bill, but the question is not whether we have a framework Bill with a lot of detail in secondary legislation—most people would accept that that is inevitable—but whether the framework is adequate. The Bill does not have an adequate framework. I shall not go down the path which my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey mentioned; I think parliamentary draftsmen are wonderful. They are quite capable of producing a wonderful beginning to the Bill, drawing on the amount of expertise that we have enunciated today. I was quite attracted to Amendments Nos. 12 and 13 in the name of my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey—in typically pithy style, they do a great deal to improve the drafting of the Bill—but we need to go a bit further than that. We need a more detailed statement of objectives of the kind that is put forward in the other amendments. While I do not want to quibble about such drafting, I have a bit of a hang-up about the word ““promote””. Regulators are not social marketing organisations; they are not marketing organisations at all. ““Encourage”” and ““support”” are fine; but I doubt whether it is the job of regulators to go around promoting anything. I agree with my noble friend Lord Harris that it is fanciful to believe that a regulator can totally ignore the policies of the Government of the day. They cannot be allowed to do that—we may have got the wording wrong. A regulator cannot decide to set up an approach that is totally independent of whatever Parliament has decided in legislation for a particular set of services. That is not the job of regulators either. I have enormous sympathy for the Minister regarding the case he will no doubt be asked to argue. I hope that he will be willing to take away the form of words put forward by people who I think are not overly proud of them and see whether, with all the skills that parliamentary draftsmen can exercise, we cannot come up with something that looks like a more suitable framework for taking forward what everybody accepts is much-needed legislation.