---

Health and Social Care Bill

moved Amendment No. 131: 131: After Clause 103, insert the following new Clause— ““Duty to co-operate The OHPA must co-operate with the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence to enable the Council to perform its functions.”” The noble Earl said: Amendment No. 131 is about the relationship between the OHPA and the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence. It brings us to a simple but important point: if the function of the CHRE is to audit the decision-making of the medical regulators, and if the OHPA is to be an integral part of the medical regulatory process, the CHRE must have free access to the work that the OHPA is doing. At the moment the Bill provides no guarantee that the CHRE will have such access. It seems fundamental that there should be a duty on the part of the OHPA to co-operate with the CHRE and to share information with it to enable the CHRE to perform its job effectively. Although I do not know what the Minister is going to say to me—she may say that the OHPA would naturally wish to share information with the CHRE and that the amendment is therefore unnecessary—we need only reflect on the possibility, which hopefully is quite remote but not unthinkable, that the CHRE might, for whatever reason, feel disposed to criticise the way in which the OHPA performed its work. In those circumstances, there could well be reluctance on the part of the OHPA to be as helpful as it should be towards the supervising regulatory body. We cannot in all situations rely on people’s good will. That is why we need an explicit duty in statute in order to place the matter beyond doubt. In fact, the very existence of such a duty should guarantee that it never needs to be formally invoked. I beg to move.