NHS Redress Bill [Lords]

I am glad to follow the hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan), who is a member of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, although not when it produced its first report on this subject. Before I come to the Committee’s report, I want to refer to the point about cross-border problems that emerged during the Secretary of State’s speech. I recognise that it is a difficult and complicated matter. I want to be quite clear what the situation is in respect of my constituents who obtain treatment in hospitals in Scotland—the same thing would apply on the English side of the Welsh border—which are usually the nearest hospitals for those living in the Berwick area, whether they use the Borders general hospital or the two or three major hospitals in Edinburgh. Usually the treatment arises because people choose to go to that particular hospital, but with the support of the health authority on the English side of the border. In some cases, the health authority may actively encourage people to make that choice. I can see that the situation is complicated because the hospital is in Scotland. An issue that would be tort in England would arise under Scots law in Scotland. The circumstances would be different. Am I right in supposing that whether the scheme applies will depend on whether the health authority on the English side can be thought to be responsible in some way for the unsatisfactory outcome? That situation would be rather limiting and a constituent would probably be much better placed taking legal action in Scotland without the benefit of the scheme. The Minister may well reply that the scheme is simply an addition to the legal rights that people have on each side of the border. However, I would not want to create a perverse incentive whereby patients were discouraged from going to an appropriate hospital because of the existence of different schemes on either side of the border. I am anxious, first, to clarify the situation, and secondly, to ensure that, in particular, the health authority on the English side will not say, ““We had better not let patients go to Scottish hospitals because we might be pursued over our aspect of the responsibility under the NHS redress scheme and we might avoid that if the whole thing was dealt with on the English side.”” I hope that, in his response, the Minister can give me some initial guidance on that and that, if necessary, the matter will be followed up fairly quickly—before the Bill gets much further—by correspondence clarifying the situation. The slight perversity of the situation is that patients on the Scottish side of the border who come to Berwick for hospital treatment—often because they go to a general practitioner in Berwick anyway—will definitely benefit from the scheme, as I understand it. There is no harm in that, but it indicates the paradoxes and complexities that will arise. I want to deal now with the reports of the Constitutional Affairs Committee—the third report of 2005-06 on compensation culture, in which there is a substantial section about the Bill, and the fifth report on the Bill itself, which is, in effect, a report of the response from the right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy), who was then Minister of State with responsibility for quality and patient safety in the Department of Health. She used her response to clarify a number of issues and we commented briefly on those in the fifth report. Many of the issues in the third report will come up again on Thursday when we debate the Compensation Bill and I hope to refer to those matters then. The report addresses issues relating to the so-called compensation culture, which is sometimes adduced in respect of the Bill and the NHS generally. It was my Committee’s conclusion that there is not a compensation culture that is driven by an increase in personal injury claims. The evidence does not point to that. There are many problems in relation to excess risk aversion in many parts of the public sector and elsewhere, but they may be driven by a whole lot of other factors, rather than by an actual increase in personal injury litigation. There is considerable confusion in the media on that point. In looking at the NHS Redress Bill, we raised a number of issues and I want to touch on some of them. We referred particularly to the total lack of detail in the Bill and its heavy dependence on secondary legislation and on non-statutory schemes to fill out that secondary legislation. That is a far from satisfactory way of legislating. It leaves the House making quite major decisions without knowing how they will work in practice and, in this case, without seeing even the draft secondary legislation that would be involved. It is quite a dangerous trend in Government to create framework legislation—we have seen it in many other areas too—that leaves the House making decisions of vague general principal and being able to deal with quite important aspects of the legislation only by way of orders. As hon. Members must be aware, even the affirmative procedure is profoundly unsatisfactory if a specific defect is found, but Members do not want to vote out the order completely because they do not want to prevent a scheme or a piece of legislation from coming into operation. The negative procedure is wholly inadequate in many such instances because hon. Members are unable even to cast a vote on measures, let alone secure the amendment of something that they consider to be fundamentally unsatisfactory. The Committee was thus critical of such a lack of detail. The Committee was presented with no compelling evidence that doctors and lawyers will be prepared to work for fixed fees and was not told what those fixed fees might be. The Government’s response made reference to fixed fees payable by the Legal Services Commission, but those fees are likely to be lower than those payable for private work. It is not apparent whether the Department expects lawyers to work for fixed fees at LSC rates, or whether participants will be able to go only to the LSC to pursue their grievance. Reference was made earlier in the debate to the problem that will arise if the LSC effectively acts as a gatekeeper to the scheme for anyone who would be eligible for legal aid. The fact that medical experts can be instructed jointly does not mean that they will be clearly independent. If the NHS Litigation Authority was able to identify the doctors that it wanted and also paid the bill, it would not lead to a perception of independence. In the world of personal injury litigation, there is often talk of claimant and defendant doctors being two rather different groups of people. Indeed, the same is true of claimant and defendant lawyers. We heard an interesting example from the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), who is a former personal injury lawyer. He referred to all the lawyers engaged on the Department’s side as ““rubbish””, which, on reflection, he might consider was a rather extreme view. However, that underlines the fact that there is a tendency for some lawyers and doctors who are called on to give evidence to be thought of as generally of use to claimants, while others are thought to be generally of use to defendant authorities. If the NHS Litigation Authority uses doctors who are thought to come into its category, it will further reduce the possibility of the proceedings being regarded as independent. The Department acknowledges that it expects the number of claims to rise and has cited the number of additional claims a year as between 2,200 and 19,500. That suggests that the estimates are very vague, which makes the prospective cost of the scheme difficult to judge. The former Minister, the right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree, made the intriguing comment that the Government could not make any predictions because that involved modelling human behaviour. However, all Government policy, including most economic policy, is based on modelling human behaviour, and fairly reliable estimates of what people might do under schemes and policies that are proposed have to be made on the basis of experience. Given the difficulties that are facing the NHS, the Committee thought it rather odd that the Department was pretty relaxed about the possible cost of the scheme and that it could engage in such an exercise, despite the wide disparities in the cost estimates. As the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) pointed out, such costs obviously represent money that is diverted from patient care, so the Department must have an understanding of the impact of its scheme on patient care costs. It is for such reasons that the Committee recommended piloting the scheme, but we did not find the Department’s response to that idea at all compelling. The Department produced various arguments against the idea, one of which has significant relevance to another point that has come up in the debate. As I said earlier, one of the Government’s arguments against piloting was that the scheme will be evaluated after three years’ operation. However, according to their published response to our Committee’s report, one of the consequences of that evaluation might be that the Government will consider extending the scheme beyond hospital care, although that contradicts directly what the Secretary of State said in her speech. I can well understand why the Government might want to take the process forward in two stages and examine the experience of the hospital sector before even considering extending the scheme to primary care, but there is no doubt that the clear implication of their original response to the Committee was that the first three years of the scheme would be an evaluation period, after which it might be extended into the primary care sector. The Government gave that three-year evaluation as a reason not to undertake any formal piloting of the scheme. The Committee remained unconvinced about that and still thought that piloting would make sense in an area where there could be substantial cost implications. I have referred already to the possible gatekeeper role of the Legal Services Commission. The chief medical officer, in making amends, recommended that the LSC should be able to take into account whether someone had used the NHS redress scheme when making a decision on application for legal aid. The LSC would come in at a later stage because if use had not been made of the scheme, that might be reason for refusing legal aid. If the LSC is to come in at an earlier stage—in effect, it is the body that is choosing the lawyers and determining the fees—that slightly casts doubt on whether it can properly use a refusal to use the scheme as the basis for not granting legal aid, if somebody is not satisfied and wants to go to court. There is some concern that the LSC, as a result of what the Government are now recommending, will be involved at two separate stages of the scheme. The difficulties to which I have referred could be ironed out in various ways. They are not insuperable obstacles. I recognise the potential value to those among our constituents who have experienced the problems that the provisions in the Bill seek to address, with a scheme that could be easier to work through than a legal scheme, and one that could also satisfy their demands for clear answers, which for some constituents are more important than getting compensation. The Committee felt that the £20,000 limit might unduly restrict the scheme. There might well be cases where someone is prepared to accept the limitations of the scheme and prepared also to accept that a case potentially justifying a larger sum could be treated under the scheme. I recognise that what the Government have produced is potentially of value. I hope that they will address some of the difficulties to which the Committee has referred and realise that in their initial responses they have either not fully done so or have generated new expectations. I hope also that in Committee they will keep very much in mind the two reports that my Committee has produced.