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Health and Social Care Bill

I shall speak to Amendment No. 175 which is tabled in my name and the names of my noble friend Lady Barker and the noble Baroness, Lady Gould. I shall not take up very much of the Committee’s time because it has all been said, but I make a plea that we look again at new Section 45C(3)(c), which talks about, "““a threat to public health””." The noble Earl, Lord Howe, pointed out that that is a very broad statement. We should then look at new Section 45G, which, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, and others, not only allows a person to be ordered to have a medical examination or to be removed to hospital but all the other things in the section, which I shall not read out. It is a very draconian curtailment of his civil liberties, because he is deemed to be a threat to public health. You could have a ruthless JP or local authority—I do not suggest for one moment that they exist in this country at the moment, but there could be such an administration in the future—which would say that a sex worker with HIV was a threat to public health. You could have an equally ruthless person saying that any gay person infected with HIV was a threat to public health, because it is such a broad term. Therefore, it is conceivable that under that Administration—we have had Governments like that in Europe and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it could happen again—those people would be subject to an order, rounded up, put in safekeeping and deprived of their liberty when, in the general sense, they are not a threat to public health. It could be interpreted in that way because of the looseness of that phrase. I urge the Minister to look at those two new sections to make sure that the Government are entirely happy that they will not be misused in future. That is why we want to see some central monitoring. There is no monitoring of these orders at the moment, and it is important that there should be. The Health Protection Agency is the ideal body to do it. We need to keep a close watch on this because of the ““just in case”” scenario. It could happen, even in the UK. We must protect our civil liberties.