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Health and Social Care Bill

I have considerable sympathy with the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Finlay on the membership of the panels. A panel of three is too small, and the idea of having two lay and two professionally qualified members is very sensible. At the very least, I hope that the Government give us a complete assurance that, when OHPA decides what number of members will sit on the panels, there will always be equality between the number of professional and lay members. That is not in the Bill, and it is a principle that is absolutely to be commended. The panels used to have on them an individual from the same profession as the respondent doctor. When I chaired the Professional Conduct Committee of the General Medical Council, we always used to appoint to the panels hearing the case a doctor from the same discipline as the doctor whose fitness to practise was under consideration. I fully appreciate that many paediatricians, particularly those who have been engaged in child protection issues, have taken the view that certain recent decisions by the GMC’s Professional Conduct Committee on doctors working in that field have been perverse and might not have been taken if a specialist paediatrician working in child protection had been sitting on the panel. I believe that the GMC now accepts that view, but the problem with a specialist from the same field sitting on the panel is that the advice by the panel and the debate by the panel about the doctor’s fitness to practise are respectively given and held in camera and are not public. One great virtue of the Bill is that it clearly defines in Clause 98 the role of the legal assessor, and clearly defines in Clause 99 the role of clinical and other specialist advisers. After Second Reading, I wrote to the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, and he wrote back, saying that he was quite confident that the specialist and clinical advisers would be chosen with the same status as the legal assessor, with the authority to have those clinical and specialist advisers from the same speciality as the respondent doctor. If the Minister can give me that assurance, it is very important that that should be accepted. Subject to that, I am happy to support the amendment, except for the one point.