Health Bill [HL]

I shall speak also to Amendments 114B and 115A to 115E. Clause 26 adds a new section after Section 150 of the National Health Service Act 2006. It gives the Secretary of State power through regulations to enable PCTs to issue remedial notices or to withhold payments as part of action to secure quality pharmaceutical services and to manage performance. The effect of the clause will be to give PCTs new powers and discretions in respect of appropriate action to address poor performance and to decommission poor services. I propose two minor and technical amendments to this clause for England. The first will remove the definition of "pharmaceutical services" from new Section 150A(3). That definition is unnecessary in the clause as the term is already defined in the existing legislation in Section 126(8) of the NHS Act. The second will insert a definition of "practitioner" in Section 150A(3). That will clarify the use of the term "practitioner" in Section 150A(1) and adopts the same language as is used to define the term elsewhere in the NHS Act. There are five amendments in respect of the provisions regarding the NHS (Wales) Act 2006. These are also minor and technical and, I stress, have been agreed by Welsh Ministers. They concern NHS ophthalmic and pharmaceutical services in Wales. The first four amendments concern the equivalent provisions for Wales regarding notices and penalties, to which I have just referred. The first amendment would create a new Chapter 1A of the NHS (Wales) Act 2006 for the provisions concerning notices and penalties. Rather than adding them to an existing chapter, this amendment means that the Welsh provisions are treated in the same way as the English provisions. The actual provisions will be unaltered by this change. The second amendment clarifies that the provisions in the new Section 106A extend to practitioners who provide pharmaceutical services and general ophthalmic services in Wales. This is because Wales has not followed the route in England of direct contracting for ophthalmic services but retains its previous arrangements. The third and fourth amendments replicate for Wales the amendments for England to which I have already referred and also remove the definition of "ophthalmic services". Definitions of ophthalmic and pharmaceutical services in the new Section 106A(3) are unnecessary as they are already defined elsewhere in the NHS (Wales) Act 2006. Pharmaceutical services are defined in Section 80(8) and general ophthalmic services in Section 71(10) of that Act. The insertion of a definition of "practitioner" into the new Section 106A(3) ensures that the language used to define "practitioner" is the same as that used elsewhere in Chapter 2 of Part 8 of that Act. The fifth and final amendment corrects an error made at consolidation in 2006. It adds a reference to ophthalmic contractors in Section 107(9) of the NHS (Wales) Act 2006 to ensure that they must comply with the same fitness-to-practise requirements that pharmaceutical contractors must meet. I hope that Members of the Committee are content with these minor amendments and I beg to move. Amendment 114A agreed.