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Health and Social Care Bill

My understanding as a lay person is that the Civil Contingencies Act is there to deal with the gaps where there is no legislation to deal with civil contingencies. This Bill addresses issues of health protection. However, we will be coming to the group commencing with Amendment No. 198 that is all about the Civil Contingencies Act, and I shall have a very much fuller briefing note, which I hope will help to explain that. Perhaps I may return to the question of ““other people””, which was raised by several noble Lords. The regulations will specify the individual who can impose specific detention, isolation or quarantine. They will be scrutinised by Parliament under the affirmative procedure. Those people will mainly be doctors and health professional officials. I think that one noble Lord identified that those would be the ““other people””, and that would indeed be the case. Amendment No. 167 also requires that only a justice of the peace can renew and review a measure every seven days after the first 14 days. One purpose of Sections 45C and 45D is to provide central powers to deal with serious and imminent threats when it may be appropriate to enable a decision-maker other than a justice of the peace to take key decisions at the relevant time. The amendment would therefore undermine that purpose by reintroducing the role of a justice of the peace. The effect of that could be that, in a widespread emergency, justices of the peace could be overrun with applications that could better be determined by authorised officers applying centrally set criteria under carefully drafted regulations. I hope that that answers the questions that have been raised and that the noble Earl will feel able to withdraw the amendment.