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Health and Social Care Bill

I also support this amendment, which would help to ensure greater transparency in the way that the Care Quality Commission allocates its resources across the three core areas of its remit of health, social care and mental health. Both the outgoing social care regulator and the Mental Health Act Commission have expressed particularly strong concerns that their area of work risks being submerged, as we have heard many times already today and will many times again, or that their work will be deprioritised, given the much greater political attention devoted to mainstream health services. They say this not out of professional insularity but because they know that it would impact negatively on the life chances of those who are most vulnerable to abuses of their human rights and who require the greatest level of support to enjoy independent living. The amendment would guard against that as the CQC would need to account to Parliament annually on how it divides its resources and effort across the three core areas. Moreover, the amendment would require the CQC to set out how it intends to involve people who use health and adult social care services, including their families and carers, in drawing up its programmes of work. We cannot afford to leave user involvement to the discretion of the new commission. If we want a user-focused regulator, we must insist on this now so that it is embedded in the CQC’s plans from day one.