My Lords, I want to speak to all the amendments in this group—and, in doing so, I have tried to take myself back in time and then, like the Doctor in “Doctor Who”, come forward again quickly. How would I deal with this set of circumstances if I was a director of social services today, as distinct from the late 1980s and early 1990s? I do not envy them because I think that they have a very difficult job
to do in balancing the resources available with the expectations of the public, which this Bill will increase. I am not sure that we crack the problem with any of these amendments, on their own. I remind the Minister that in Committee I tabled an amendment, so that we could debate this, which gave the Secretary of State powers to make regulations when there were unsatisfactory employment practices. I deliberately drew that amendment widely, because I do not think that we should just concentrate on the 15-minute visits. That is today’s problem—but we have a series of problems, and there could be another lot of problems with employment practices coming along a few months or years down the track.
At the moment, we have four areas in which there are concerns about employment practices. We have zero-hour contracts with exclusivity and no guarantees of working, 15-minute visits and unpaid travelling time, which I would suggest are all incompatible for the most part with the ambitions of this Bill. I am not saying that my previous amendment was perfect or right—and I am pleased that the Minister has come back with some attempts to grapple with these problems. I do not dismiss his attempts, because these are intrinsically difficult problems, but we need to future-proof this Bill against new practices that may creep up.
What I like about Amendment 151, in the name of my noble friend, is that it puts things very clearly in the court of the regulator, and enables the regulator to look at both providers and commissioners. On some of this, providers are doing only what they are asked to do; they are responding to what the commissioners are expecting of them. So we cannot just blame the providers, although I would like to blame some of them, when local authorities are engaging and encouraging them, in some parts of the country, to engage in practices that are totally incompatible with the aspirations of this Bill.
Where do we go from here? I still think that the Minister might be wise to consider the idea of taking a regulation-making power for the Secretary of State, but I equally accept that that may not produce change fast enough. I found Amendment 27 noble in spirit but a little unclear about what its effect would be. Therefore I come back to Amendment 151. Of all the amendments, I think that is the one that gives me more confidence that there is a capacity to respond to concerns about commissioning practices and provider practices. I do not like the idea of a time limit for visits being set in this Bill because I would not want to be running a social services department with that kind of limitation on my ability to deploy my staff in a sensible way and in the best interests of the service users.
I do not think that we have cracked this problem fully. I think my noble friend has come forward with a better way of getting a grip on these issues, where the regulator picks up noise in the system about these unsuitable employment practices and can take some action both on the commissioning side and on the provider side. My only concern is that there is a later amendment that slightly moves the CQC away from intervening in local authority commissioning, which I think would be incompatible with what we need to do to tackle some of the problems covered by this group
of amendments. I hope the Minister can tell me that I have got that bit wrong, but my reading of a later amendment is that it removes the CQC from actually monitoring the commissioning of adult social care.