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Health and Social Care Bill

Thank you for calling me, Mr Speaker, for what I hope will be a brief intervention prompted by the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) and the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). Later this evening, the House will consider—yet again, many of us would say—the Health and Social Care Bill, but the issue for consideration now is whether the Government should publish the transitional risk register on the Bill. The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne was explicit that he was not arguing that all strategic risk registers should be published, and acknowledged the argument that there needed to be private space in which civil servants could give advice to Ministers secure in the knowledge that it would remain private, because there was an important interest of good government that that discipline and space should exist. That is an argument that he explicitly accepted and of which I am a strong supporter. My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury reminded the House that only yesterday two retired former heads of the civil service told peers in the other place of the importance of the principle that Ministers must be able to receive advice from civil servants on policy issues, including the risks associated with them, without that advice later becoming public. The issue that the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne did not cover but which is important is that there needs to be confidence within the civil service about which side of the line advice will fall. If civil servants can give advice to Ministers believing that it will remain confidential and if, after the advice is given, the line is moved and the advice falls to be published, we run the risk that across Whitehall the space that he advocates will, in truth, not exist, because there will not be the confidence that the advice will not later fall to be published.