UK Parliament / Open data

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels: NHS Ambulance Services and the NHS Patient Transport Service) Regulations 2023

I thank noble Lords. In keeping with other comments, I will be brief in my response. We genuinely see a situation where, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, we all agree that we want minimum service levels every day. As the noble Lord, Lord Collins, said in the previous debate, no one is against minimum service levels. All we are talking about here are the tactics to how we achieve that. I also totally agree with the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, that using the language of conciliation has to be the right approach in disputes. However, all these SIs are designed to do is to provide that safety net. To address the point of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, there have been other circumstances where there was a genuine concern that strikes would not enable those minimum service levels to be fulfilled. That is what we are talking about today.

In response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, I agree that it will be up to the ambulance’s trust, or the other trust when we come to other parts, to use its best judgment on how to achieve those minimum service levels. It is at management level, but it is then our job as the Government to hold them to account. Clearly, if during these strike actions the trust was not achieving minimum service levels, and there were certain standards which put patient safety at risk, in those circumstances I would be expected, as would any Minister, to ask the relevant trust why that was the case and perhaps to reconsider, because its judgment call did not bear fruit on that occasion. This is all about trying to give the trust part of the toolkit to ensure what we all want, which is minimum service levels. We are not compelling it; we are giving it the choice to do it. We hope that it is never needed but we believe it is an important part of the toolkit.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
834 c1518 
Session
2023-24
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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