Local Involvement Networks (Duty of Services-Providers to Allow Entry) Regulations 2008

I thank the Minister for setting out clearly the provisions of this statutory instrument and for the compliment that she paid to the noble Earl and me for our involvement at an earlier stage—a much earlier stage—of all this. Broadly speaking, like him, I suppose that I am satisfied with much of the statutory instrument, but I have much the same concerns as he has, although we have not collaborated or talked to each other about this. I would like briefly to consider those concerns. First, I am delighted that a change was made during the course of this legislation on the Floor of the House to allow LINks members to go in and view the premises in question. We achieved all-party agreement on that. All sides of the House agreed that this was a good thing. Rather like the noble Earl, I am concerned at the elements of restriction that seem to have crept into the statutory instrument. I would be grateful to the noble Baroness for her comments on that. I, too, was worried about the definition of communal areas. One example is bathrooms. The noble Earl referred to ladies’ loos, but other areas are not used communally, but are communal areas. On the whole, people do not use bathrooms at the same time as other people, but bathrooms are communal areas because of their shared use. Are we saying that members of LINks can inspect bathrooms? The state of the equipment in bathrooms in care homes is very often a cause of complaint and concern. I would have thought that those are precisely the areas that LINks members would be able to look at in the same way that we expect CSCI inspectors to see them at the moment. I would like some clarity about communal and non-communal areas. We are not clear here. Like the noble Earl, I am particularly concerned about Regulation 3(2)(a). The statutory instrument states, "““if the presence of an authorised representative on those premises … would compromise ... the effective provision of care services or … the privacy or dignity of any person””." There is no clue about who decides that, and that is a real question. It is quite possible that a care home or a ward could be doing all sorts of things that members of a LINk who are authorised representatives would find reprehensible, but if they were told, ““Sorry, you can’t come in here””, and that they could not go in to see that people were walking around naked because it would compromise their dignity, where is the capacity for authorised representatives to challenge the view given by the person running the care home? We have to raise that point. As it stands, it is an unsatisfactory situation. My second point, relating to private provision, has been made well by the noble Earl. After all, something like 90 per cent of care homes are now private. If these regulations do not apply to those who own or run care homes, we need to know that. It is seriously worrying, and I thought that we had agreed that earlier. The noble Earl raised most of the issues that I wanted to raise, but I wish to raise the matter of what authorised representatives will be able to do when they enter and view premises. Earlier on in this process, we were told that they cannot inspect. Are they able to ask members of staff about what is going on? Are they able to ask patients, users of services and residents about what is going on and how they feel? Without that, we are unclear about whether authorised representatives have enough capacity to find out the truth about what is going on. We need reassurance on that. My final point is that, like the noble Earl, I would like to know what has happened about the transition between the patient forums and the new LINks system. We have heard remarkably little about it. This is an important part of it and we need greater clarity about how far we have got.