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Health and Social Care Bill

I have said on many occasions in your Lordships’ House that we are in serious danger of living in an overregulated society. Over the past few years, there has been a huge number of government initiatives, some of them very easy to understand. For example, I was president of the General Medical Council between 1982 and 1989. Subsequently, because that body ran into considerable difficulties for reasons that I do not need to explain, it was overseen, as were the other professional regulatory bodies, by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, another Big Brother overseeing the activities of Big Brother. In various clauses, such as this one, the Bill reeks of Big Brother. It is an issue of direction. I remind the Committee that many years ago the late Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, said that professional self-regulation was one of the glories of a learned and civilised society and that the alternative, regulation by the state, was too fearful to contemplate. That exact phrase was echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, in his Jeffcock lecture to the Royal Society of Medicine in defence of the UK professions. As my noble friend Lord Low said, in this clause and many others it is the word ““direct”” that we regard as being totally unacceptable. It would be possible to modify the wording to make it much more reasonable. For instance, the wording, ““the Secretary of State may indicate””, is much less prescriptive and much more acceptable. The Secretary of State could indeed indicate, "““such aspects of government policy””," as might be taken into account by the new commission. A modification of that nature is essential, because the direction of the Bill takes government control of the commission far too far and is quite unacceptable.