Piped Music etc. (Hospitals) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am one of those who did not give the original Bill a tremendously good welcome. This Bill is in a slightly more workable form of words, although I am still not 100 per cent convinced that background music, piped music, canned music—call it what you will—is that bad. In my experience, based admittedly on a limited number of times sitting in accident and emergency departments, waiting to be treated for small injuries and so on, one can wait for long periods without being prepared. Things go wrong in hospitals, and TV screens or a little music allow you to switch off, not because the music is to your taste but often because it cuts down the amount of background noise. You may be waiting to have two stitches in your knee, as I said before, when someone comes in after a big road accident. You are then quite rightly at the back of the queue, but you see people running around, especially in accident and emergency departments, and stress levels go up. Some form of distraction is needed. The one most easily available to you is probably television, and it should be available in these circumstances. That is what makes me slightly more cautious about this. I commend the noble Lord for making the Bill short enough to read quickly. It says that exemptions could be made where it was felt to be in the patient’s interests. I suggest that a balance will always have to be struck. It might be interesting to have guidance from the Minister, now or at another point, on where the Government think it is appropriate not to have music and in which circumstances. I believe that, in our previous debate on the subject, the noble Lord talked about someone who had died in a hospital with friends and relatives around the bedside, with music blaring out from somewhere else. This might be better addressed by a little common sense and guidance to ward administrators on the appropriate level of background music. Other than that, I have no active objection to the Bill, although I certainly could not bring myself to support it actively.