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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, following the brief discussion on the interaction between Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission in Grand Committee, I appreciate the fact that the noble Earl, Lord Howe, has given me the opportunity, with Amendment No. 15, to explore how the Care Quality Commission’s registration of care service providers will fit with Ofsted’s parallel registration regime for providers of children’s social care services under the Care Standards Act 2000. That is my understanding of the purpose of Amendment No. 15. Noble Lords will appreciate, as we have heard, that the regulation of children’s social care is now the responsibility of Ofsted. However, the regulation of children’s healthcare will remain with the healthcare regulator, the Care Quality Commission, in future. The purpose of Clause 4(2)(b) is to ensure that services are not regulated twice—by both Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission—by specifically excluding any services that are registered with Ofsted from the definition of ““regulated activity””. To ensure that certain types of vital care services cannot fall between the cracks and be excluded from registration with either regulator, the definition of social care in Clause 5 is not a definition of adult social care. For example, those domiciliary care agencies which cater only for children can be within the scope of registration within the Care Quality Commission, so long as they are not already required to register with Ofsted. Alternative forms of drafting could well have resulted in neither body being able to assure the safety and quality of these vital care services. I know this is of particular concern to the Commission for Social Care Inspection. Of course, the commission and Ofsted are required to co-operate with each other, through Schedule 4 of the Bill and Ofsted’s parallel legislation, Schedule 13 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. I thought that most of the discussion concerned Ofsted’s qualitative functionality as a regulator. The noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, very eloquently described—and was supported by my noble friend Lord Warner—how Ofsted is able to focus on the wider interest of children and young people, allowing a comprehensive view to be taken across care, education and skills. I am also led to believe that Ofsted took experienced inspectors with a significant knowledge of the social care sector and the inspection framework that Ofsted adopted in 2007 and was identical to the one used by the Commission for Social Care Inspection. As my noble friend said, if that framework is not functioning—the noble Earl, Lord Howe, has concerns about that—I have no doubt that as we wait for the inquiry of the Select Committee on Health, we can look at the functionality of Ofsted in more depth. I hope that I have been able to explain the benefit of Clause 4 and that the amendment can now be withdrawn.