Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, this has been an important and thoughtful debate which I am sure will inform the discussions which the noble Earl is about to embark upon with colleagues across the House. I rise to speak to Amendment 38 on a much narrower point. In the spirit of that amendment I will undertake not to impose any burden on the House in terms of taking a disproportionate amount of time to deal with it. The amendment refers to paragraph (b) of new Section 1C, which the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, also referred to in what I thought was a masterly and devastating critique of Clause 4 as a whole. The amendment would replace ““unnecessary”” with ““disproportionate”” in terms of the relief of burdens on organisations within the framework of the health service. The noble Lord is quite right to say that ““unnecessary burdens”” could mean anything. He might think that ““disproportionate burdens”” could also mean almost anything, but at least it gives a sense of direction which would be more acceptable to your Lordships. The Government as a whole are somewhat obsessed with burdens in the belief that almost any duty—whether in terms of employment law or other issues, notional concerns about health and safety or even human rights legislation—is deemed to be somehow a dreadful burden. What is a burden to one set of people may be a perfectly reasonable duty in the eyes of others. In this particularly sensitive context of a key public service affecting everybody in the country as a patient or potential patient, it seems necessary to err on the side of caution when setting out a stall which could lead to great difficulty in any sensible degree of regulation. Of course one can overprescribe regulation. One can also underprescribe it. As it stands the clause appears to err very much in the direction of the latter. I hope therefore that the Government will look again at the drafting of the clause and that some move can be made in the direction set out in Amendment 38 in my name and in that of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker.