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Health and Social Care Bill

There has been a fundamental misunderstanding of this group of amendments in that the responses that we have just heard from the Minister and the correspondence that I have had from my noble friend Lord Darzi all seem to suggest that it is proposed that the only channel of expression of user interest and user voice will be through LINks. However, the amendment suggests that there is statutory recognition of that voice—that channel—along with all the other channels that merit being specifically referred to in the Bill because the bodies that are being set up by Parliament for this purpose will receive public money for this purpose. For that reason, they should be separately and explicitly mentioned. In case the Minister is not minded to reply to that point, I shall also comment on her saying why it was not appropriate for the Care Quality Commission to report on the effectiveness of LINk arrangements. She said in effect that she acknowledged the distinction that I was drawing between accountability to a body that has a vested interest in running things and making them effective and that external scrutiny would be by the Department of Health. Yet we are told—she made this clear in her response—that the Care Quality Commission will have a responsibility to look at how engaged the public and service users in each area are in service planning and in the impact on public involvement and user feedback on local services. We are told that the Care Quality Commission will do that, so are we now being told that the effectiveness of those arrangements will be scrutinised by the Care Quality Commission and entirely separately by some army of civil servants in the Department of Health? The implication of what she is saying is that this will be duplicated. The Care Quality Commission will do work on how effective these arrangements are in local areas, but it must not publish it because that would not quite fit in with everything else that it does. It will do it and keep it secret. Separately, the Department of Health will monitor the commission’s effectiveness and presumably tell someone whether it thinks it is effective.