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Health and Social Care Bill

I welcome this opportunity to explore this issue, and I will try to be brief in my remarks. I need to say from the outset that the noble Baroness and I look at this in different ways. In the view of the Government, this is about building a diverse marketplace for healthcare provision, so we start from a different point of view. Social enterprises, the voluntary sector and the private sector play a part in that. I am happy to make available as much information about what social enterprises do and what the definitions are as the Committee wants to have. I declare an interest as a former chair of the Social Enterprise Coalition, a position that I held for five years until last autumn. I can bore for Britain about social enterprises and am happy to do so, but I shall not do so now. The benefits of social enterprises are very apparent. The Bank of England, the DTI, the Treasury and Office of the Third Sector have all undertaken research and published reports about this. They highlight the problems facing social enterprises and the wider third sector in accessing appropriate funding and finance. That is what these clauses seek to remedy. The lack of appropriate forms of finance available to social enterprises is a major barrier to the entry, sustainability and scalability of social enterprises. A survey by the DTI’s small business service showed that social enterprises were more likely to be discouraged from applying for finance than other small and medium-sized enterprises. The aim of these clauses is to allow the Secretary of State, where appropriate, to help social enterprises overcome those barriers and give financial support to qualifying bodies that deliver health and social care services. They allow the Secretary of State to fund qualifying bodies that deliver related services to healthcare and social providers. I shall not go through each of the clauses saying what they do because that would probably not be appreciated by the Committee at this stage, but I am happy to write in detail to Members of the Committee about this. The intention is to enable us, in due course, to run a competition for an independent fund manager, possibly a social enterprise, and expert bodies to work with us to manage a social enterprise investment fund that will allow the further development of social enterprise and access a greater range of social investment expertise. The final approach will depend on developments over the next year and the review of the operation. The Secretary of State will use the power in Clause 147 to set up the company and the fund. These clauses will help us achieve our vision for the reform of health and social care—a vision that calls for a diverse range of providers, including social enterprises, so that we can increase choice for patients and drive up the quality and responsiveness of services.