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Health and Social Care Bill

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Clause 1, page 1, line 9, at end insert— ““(2A) Subsections (1) and (2) shall not have effect until the Secretary of State has made a statutory instrument containing an order to that effect. (2B) A statutory instrument shall not be made under subsection (1) unless— (a) the Secretary of State has commissioned a review, to be prepared with the aid of an independent assessor, of the case for and against, and alternatives to, the merger of the Commissions referred to in subsection (2), (b) the Secretary of State has published an assessment of the outcome of that review, and (c) a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, both Houses of Parliament. (2C) The assessment referred to in subsection (2B)(b) must be published within three months of the passing of this Act.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, in view of the fact that I have chosen ““Statement afternoon”” to do so, I seek not to detain the House for any more time than is necessary to move this amendment. I am sorry to have provoked a mass walk-out before I have said anything controversial. Later on, such few members of my audience as remain will no doubt join those who are departing from the Chamber. I will be reasonably brief and in order to be reasonably brief, I shall not spell out yet again the case for my amendment. At Second Reading I set out the case for not proceeding with this amalgamation and a number of noble Lords backed that in Committee. This really is the most modest amendment imaginable to deal with the difference of opinion over amalgamation. All I am asking is that when the Bill has gone through, Ministers spend a month or two taking another look at the arguments for and against and decide whether the amalgamation really is in the public interest. I could not do that myself because I am deeply committed to the view that it is not in the public interest. If the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, who has been very attentive and kind in listening to my arguments on this case, said, ““I will do that””, all will be done and dusted—the Government could just go ahead and do that; the amendment is not needed in the Bill. I will not make the case for why we need the amendment but I will deal with the case for ““Why not the amendment?””. What has persuaded Ministers on this? I believe them to be persuaded; the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, is a surprising and honest man and he sometimes does surprise us but my understanding is that he is not likely to support the amendment. I will go through the arguments against. I am sorry if I am taking the noble Lord’s thunder in doing so. I was taught in my days in politics that you should always get your retaliation in first. There are three arguments for not adopting the amendment. The first, which was set out in a letter to me from the Minister in another place, Ben Bradshaw, is that it will cause disruption to the staff of the three organisations being amalgamated; that is, delay will totally unsettle them and they will all go off and get other jobs. Many noble Lords have experience of amalgamations, mergers, changes in structure and so on and they will have heard this argument time and again. My experience is that it is invariably hugely exaggerated. With regard to the people in the Commission for Social Care Inspection, my understanding is that there are not an awful lot of jobs as social care inspectors going begging to which they could rush because there had been a month’s delay while the arrangement was being looked at again. As some noble Lords will know, I am quite involved—one of my less serious aspects—with horseracing and the Tote. For years—since the Labour Government first promised, in, I think, 1997, to sell off the Tote to the private sector—its employees have been in a state of suspension, not knowing whether the Tote would exist or whether their jobs would exist. Meanwhile, the Tote has gone from strength to strength: its profits rise and the number of employees leaving is not very different from the figures for anywhere else in the world. It manages to cope with uncertainty. Uncertainty is a fact of human life and most of us cope with it perfectly well. If the staff of the three agencies concerned were under tremendous pressure to go and work somewhere else I would understand the worry involved, but we are talking about only a month or two, so that is not a plausible reason, although it is the kind of reason that invariably finds its way into ministerial briefs. It is not true that uncertainty is involved. The second argument against the very short delay that I have proposed is that the Bill has gone through the House of Commons, which expressed its opinion on the subject and passed the proposal, and it is not therefore for your Lordships’ House to stand in the way of the expressed will of another place. I will make two points on that. First, if I were a more eloquent person than, alas, I am, and I had managed to persuade Ministers that having another look at the whole thing was the right way forward and that we should therefore have a delay, would Ministers worry for a single second that there had been a vote in another place in favour of the proposal? Of course they would not; they would just say, ““We have thought further and we are changing this””, and they would go back to another place, which would be happy to accept that, and it would be agreed to. This is really is a piece of constitutional dogma masquerading as an argument to suit ministerial convenience, and it will not for a moment wash. In any case, let us suppose that we ran a political system where Ministers were, one way or another, incentivised to resist all possible change to all possible Bills by whatever forces—perhaps the Civil Service, perhaps other bodies, I do not know. If we ran a sensible system, it would operate as follows. The Bill would go through the House of Commons. Thereafter, it would be clear that there was not consensus in favour of what the Government were proposing and there would be arguments either way. It would therefore make perfectly good sense to have another, final, brief look at the Bill before deciding to proceed with the policy. There would be no need for an amendment to the Bill; there would be a commencement date and Ministers could decide not to commence if they were convinced that it was not the right thing to do. That may seem like constitutional outrage to some people here, but it seems to me a sensible way of doing business. The third argument that I have heard advanced—I hope I am wrong about this in some ways—is that the new commissions have been agreed by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. She will be the chair of the new organisation and she has done it on the basis that what she is going to get is what is in the Bill and that it cannot be changed. Here I admit to a difficulty, because if anyone is going to take on this mess, I would prefer it to be the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. It anybody can make silk purses out of sows’ ears, she is the person I would back to do that. This goes back to the point that I made in Committee—when other noble Lords agreed—which is that putting in place a chair before a Bill has gone through the House shows a lack of wisdom. I raised the point with Ministers at the time and they said that it is not unprecedented. Of course it is not unprecedented and sometimes it makes very good sense. But when an issue is live in this House, it seems extremely unwise to agree a whole set of conditions with somebody under which they will take it, dependent on the Bill remaining unchanged, when the Bill has yet to be put before the House and the opinion of the House on it remains to be tested. I do not blame the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, for insisting that she must have a free hand on the structures of what is going to go into this and that we cannot have any doubt whatever that it is going to go ahead. If I were in her shoes, which thank God, I am not, I might possibly take the same view. However, it leaves the House in a most paradoxical position. If every single Peer in this Chamber now and hundreds more go into the Content lobby this afternoon, and if the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady Young of Old Scone, are in the Not-Content lobby, the view of the hundreds will count for nothing because they will send it back to the Commons who will send it back to us as originally drafted and we will have achieved nothing. That does not show the respect for this Chamber that I should have hoped from these Ministers and this Government. We should be able to make our views clear and we should be able to do it without the effective veto that I have just described. I have reflected hard as to whether I should seek the opinion of the House on the Bill. On fine balance, I have concluded that that would not be the right thing to do. My amendment simply asks Ministers to look at this again. It may seem to be a tremendous demand but that is all I am asking. If Ministers oppose this today, even if we pass it in the House, it is a complete waste of time asking them to look at it again because they will look at it with a closed mind. Even if they do not send the Bill back to the other place and we submit it, all they will do is say, ““We were right all along””. Ministers usually say that, and that is all that will happen if we vote them down this afternoon. Therefore, I shall not seek to divide the House this afternoon. I have put my case as clearly as I can and I think that there has been some sympathy for it on all sides of the House. I just ask that before Third Reading Ministers look one more time at the arguments that have been put and at the weakness of the arguments that they have made the other way. I ask them to consider whether they can agree to my proposal or to a variant of it so that, if we go ahead, such a proposal will have the full consensus not only of this House but of the wider regulating community, and we will all be able to go forward in harmony. I beg to move.