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Health and Social Care Bill

I support these amendments. In particular, I support the comments of my noble friend Lady Stern on the implementation of the Human Rights Act in relation to care homes and how that could possibly be helped by the Care Quality Commission. I am anxious that the Government should bring forward provisions to address that in relation to privately funded, but also publicly funded, complainants in care homes. I have recently experienced a very elderly relative being evicted from a care home as a result of becoming too dependent and frail. She was shipped off to hospital with a fractured femur, which is very common. I have experienced that professionally a million times, as have many other doctors, I am sure. She was evicted with no notice at all and we were told, ““She is now in hospital, so it is up to you to find somewhere else because she is just too bad for us to take back, even if she recovers””. At the end of the rehabilitation process for the fractured femur, we as a family are faced with trekking around trying to find an alternative placement. That kind of eviction happens often. Since I have made this case known, many people have written to me about similar instances. There is nowhere to complain to. Of course, I have complained to the group of homes where this occurred, but there is absolutely no come-back at all; no right to retain your home; no right to have an appropriate assessment of services; no right to have things talked through at all; and nowhere to complain about the manner in which such things are done. I turn to the amendment of my noble friend Lady Meacher on the need for a power to follow up the recommendations that result from investigations of complaints. My noble friends Lord Patel and Lady Meacher will be endlessly aware of complaints that have been investigated by the Mental Health Act Commission, when one has had to go back time and time again to the same place to say, ““What have you done about it?””, and nothing happens. You almost have to sit on the doorstep of the medical director, the senior nurse or the chief executive and say, ““I am not leaving your office until you have given me a plan of what you are going to do about this problem””. I applaud the fact that yet again there is an emphasis on local resolution, but the NHS has been spectacularly bad at dealing with matters locally and is perhaps even worse than local authorities, although I am not so sure about their complaints procedures. The responses to complaints—when as chairman of the strategic health authority you sign the letters that finally reach you because they are so dreadful—embarrass you, because the responses are transparently ghastly. You can only send them back so often for a rewrite before you agree to sign them. We must give someone powers—I cannot see who else it could be except the Care Quality Commission—to be able to go in and ask, ““Have you achieved this, this and this, which were recommended as a result of this complaint?””, to ensure that trusts and other health service and social service bodies are faced with the threat that at least Big Brother will breath down their neck if they do not do it. The Care Quality Commission is Big Brother in this respect.