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Health and Social Care Bill

I shall speak briefly to probing Amendment No. 166A. I support the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, and praise the exposition of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, on this group of amendments. I have difficulty with this issue. When I read page 69, line 37 of the Bill, which mentions ““other persons””, I assumed that it referred to public health personnel from the local health authority—the primary care trust—which was engaged in this. My question for the Minister is: is that right? I am familiar with the public health intervention powers and powers under the National Assistance Act, which I will talk about later. These provide a clear hierarchy of intervention powers. It is clear that the local public health department is responsible, through a medical officer of health or a proper officer, for who must make the decision and when. I understand that we are trying to legislate for a broad range of threats but we need to have far greater clarity about how this will be translated into regulation and the practicalities of that. Given that these are rather draconian powers, they need considerable watching. We will discuss the monitoring of those powers later, because that is another aspect that concerns us. We need far greater clarity about who will do what to whom and when.