NHS Redress Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall speak principally to Amendment No. 42 in this group. As I said earlier, in the long period since Committee, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, and I had the welcome opportunity to talk to a number of the organisations involved in such work and potentially involved in a new form of redress scheme. It is no secret that we met them; we had very useful meetings. Over that period, a number of different people, including the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and I, coming from the slightly different positions that we set out in Grand Committee, brought points of principle into our discussions with those responsible for making these and similar schemes work. The proposal contains an admirable blend of principle and pragmatism. We have attempted, first, as the noble Earl, Lord Howe, said, to introduce independence to the fact-finding process, which is the first stage of the two-stage process that the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, talked about in Grand Committee. Secondly, we have taken into account the very strong case made by the Minister in Grand Committee that a new organisation should not be created to run the redress scheme. It would be expensive and would remove from scheme members their responsibility in part for the scheme and their responsibility to develop a learning culture. We are not talking about setting up a separate organisation. We have also taken into account the pleas of my noble friend Lady Tonge, who, from her many years of sterling work in the NHS, was resolutely opposed to anything that could be seen as the basis for building an entire new NHS department—as is the NHS’s wont. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, has set out the ways in which we see the people involved being approved by the Healthcare Commission. We see their work as being monitored to ensure that it meets certain standards. That falls clearly within the remit of the Healthcare Commission as it stands; it would not be sucked into individual cases at a local level. Our proposal is a way of guaranteeing—and constantly monitoring—a service of suitable quality and sufficient independence to guarantee the integrity of the process for the NHS and patients themselves. Perhaps the most compelling part of the proposal is that findings of fact would have an integrity that is crucial to the secondary process, not of assessing liability, but of making clear the lessons that must be learnt, and by whom. It is therefore the most important aspect of what we are discussing.