Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord will allow me to remind him very respectfully that we are on Report and not in Committee. I am trying to work through my arguments, which I hoped would have a flow to them, but my flow has been interrupted. I am getting to what I hope he wants me to get to. I was saying that the amendment would effectively require you to prove a negative—in this case, that people were not told about something going wrong with their healthcare. If they were not aware of the error, they would not be aware that they had not been told about it, and the volume of incidents is such that a single national body could not possibly verify compliance with that requirement. I know that the noble Baroness advocates that the CQC should not routinely monitor this duty and instead should require organisations only to provide evidence that they encourage openness through having appropriate procedures and policies in place. Unfortunately, what that creates—this point was made by my noble friend Lord Ribeiro—is a tick-box exercise. Organisations can provide all the assurances in the world that processes are in place and therefore they are considered to be compliant, when in actual fact it could be that patients were still not being told about errors in their care. That is not acceptable and would not deliver the culture change that we need. We must have a requirement that ensures that patients are told of errors, not one that pays lip service to this and allows organisations—