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Health and Social Care Bill

My noble friend Lord Warner and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, are fundamentally in the same position of aiming for proportionate regulation that minimises the burden on providers. Clause 4 enables the Secretary of State to make regulations that list the activities that need to be registered with the commission. As the Committee will be aware, we recently started a three-month consultation on the registration of health and adult social care providers, which includes our proposals for the list of health and adult social care services that we believe should be within the scope of registration. While I agree with my noble friend that some activities will pose a sufficiently low risk to exclude them from regulation, we do not believe that the best way of ensuring this is by negative resolution. We want to ensure that there is maximum engagement and scrutiny in developing the registration system. We therefore propose that affirmative procedures should apply to the regulations that determine the activities that will be regulated by the commission, both the first time that they are made and any time that they are changed. Given the impact on services to be brought into or removed from the scope of registration, it is our intention that any change to the regulations would also be subject to public consultation. The removal of activities from the list of regulated activities is a serious matter and noble Lords and Members in the other place would wish there to be parliamentary oversight and debate of these decisions. Indeed, the Delegated Powers Committee took into account the fact that the affirmative procedure will apply to these regulations; in its judgment, this broad delegation was appropriate. Even within the scope of registration, the new commission will take a proportionate approach to regulation. This means that it will inspect some activities more than others, depending on the relative risk of carrying on those activities. We recognise that the list of regulated activities will need to be revised from time to time as new ways of delivering services are developed, as new techniques that make activities less risky are developed or, indeed, as my noble friend mentioned, as other activities are taken within the scope of the commission’s work. This might mean that an activity can be removed from the list of activities requiring registration. That is precisely why the list is to be defined in secondary legislation as opposed to being on the face of the Bill. I hope that I have made sufficiently clear the reasons why the amendment is not necessary and that my noble friend will feel at least relatively satisfied and withdraw his amendment.