Health Bill [HL]

I imagine that veterans of the Committee will look at Amendment 48 and consider that it is one of the classic devices to which opposition Members resort when they are trying to probe the intentions of legislation or clip the wings of the Secretary of State. That was not my intention in this amendment. The request for a report to Parliament four years after ““the coming into force”” of quality accounts was not mechanistic. It is a way to offer Parliament the opportunity to evaluate the sorts of data which we have become much more accustomed to seeing as a result of CSCI and the Healthcare Commission. Their annual reports to Parliament have become not simply events to which Members of Parliament turn up to find out how their local providers are performing in relation to others, in a kind of league table, but annual focal points which concentrate the minds of Members of Parliament on the impact of legislation on the NHS. Furthermore, they provide opportunities for regulators to put directly before Members of Parliament not only an overall comparative picture of the performance of the NHS but a themed analysis of parts of social care, in the case of CSCI. I take this opportunity to put on record an appreciation of the work of Sir Ian Kennedy, Anna Walker and Denise Platt for the information that they have provided to Parliament during the existence of the bodies which they have led so ably. The purpose behind this was to complete the circle of the work of the noble Lord, Lord Darzi. He went out with a mission, backed by the Government, to talk to clinicians, patients, users and so on, and he has brought before us a system, elements of which we have spent this afternoon probing. The intention behind this is to present an opportunity for those findings to be returned to Parliament. In future, Parliament will go on to base its legislative work and policy on much of the data which results from the work that the Minister is doing. The second reason why the amendment is in this form relates to Clause 2. When the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, introduced the concept of quality accounts, he was at pains to stress that they would not be a crude league table, but that they would generate information which took into account the different population profiles in which individual clinicians and institutions worked. Therefore, it follows that it should be possible to look at the impact of quality accounts on health inequalities, which is a running concern of Parliament. For those two reasons, I thought that it was worth while tabling this amendment. It may look like a standard wheeze, but it is not; it has serious intent. I beg to move.