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Health and Social Care Bill

As noble Lords will appreciate from our debate on the first day in Committee, I strongly support the noble Earl, Lord Howe, in this amendment. I support the amendment more strongly today than I did yesterday, because, in our debates for the past two Committee sessions, I have become increasingly concerned that the Government are failing to hear what is being said loudly and clearly—that the Bill as it stands will not provide us with a regulator that is fit and able to regulate social care. My big concern is that the Government seem not yet to have grasped that, although it is entirely understandable that the focus of their attention is acute health—because that is what they fund and provide—the majority of social care is not funded by government and is not provided in the same way. I take this opportunity to put on the record that my misgivings on this legislation, and everything that has happened under its auspices, are leading me more and more to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that it is bad legislation that we should oppose more strongly than we have done so far. I agree entirely with the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that of course the Government need to retain the right to require the commission to conduct special reviews and special investigations when there has been a particular problem, as was the case in an acute hospital in Kent before Christmas. However, that should not be a blanket provision to enable the commission essentially to sweep away two years of extraordinarily good work that has been carried out by CSCI and the Healthcare Commission. We are in danger of losing sight of that.