NHS Redress Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his reply. Perhaps I may preface my remarks by saying that there is an error in Amendment No. 42. It should refer to the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection; the name has not been printed correctly. I recognise that the Minister has made a good deal of effort to move at least in part in my direction and I thank him for the obvious thought that he has devoted to these issues. However, he is right to say that we start from different positions. His scepticism about the role of patient redress investigators was overdone. He expressed the view that the investigators would not have the necessary skill mix to do their job properly. All I can say is that—to take the well tried model of the coroner—no one would argue that coroners do not have the necessary skill mix to do their job, and very much the same kind of skills are required for patient redress investigators. The Minister’s proposed solution, which I have listened to very carefully, suffers from one principal shortcoming. The question I ask myself is this: how could a member of staff from within the trust command the necessary degree of confidence with the public? He simply will not have the element of independence I referred to earlier. The Minister’s offer builds upon the provisions of Clause 10(2)(h), as he said, but because it does so and because the individual concerned would be part of the management team, we are not looking at a sufficiently radical solution to the difficulty here. There is a major matter of principle. It is that there should be independence in the process and a separation of functions. There is very considerable judicial authority for the need to separate fact-finding from fault-finding. During the Recess, I had the pleasure of reading a number of transcripts of recent judgments in the Court of Appeal which underline this principle time and again. It is a key principle of international jurisprudence.