Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I rise to intervene on this Motion today with a very heavy heart—and empty-handed, because the Government have refused to release the risk register on the implementation of the Health and Social Care Bill, as instructed in the judgment of the Information Commissioner last Friday. I am grateful to the Minister for his letters to me and other noble Lords explaining the Government’s position on this matter. Thorough explanations are helpful but they do not make this a right or just position for the Government to take. The Government inform us that they need 28 days to consider this issue. I would just make the point that the Department of Health has had a whole year to think about this issue. Noble Lords may recall that I drew this important matter to the attention of the House on Monday and specifically asked the Minister to assist the House in its deliberations by making the risk register available. I am most grateful that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, supported my appeal. Since Monday, it has become clear that the well respected Conservative MP, Dr Sarah Wollaston, made the same plea to her own Secretary of State in a letter to the Evening Standard. I beg the leave of the House to say I have nowhere else to raise this important matter. I do not wish to delay the House but I want to make two points and ask two questions of the Minister. There is a precedent that I urge the Minister to consider. In 2008 the noble Earl’s then honourable friend, Miss Justine Greening MP, recently promoted to the Cabinet, used an appeal to the Information Commissioner to get the release of the risk documentation on the Heathrow third runway. I am sad to report that my own Government did not cover itself in glory in this matter, refusing to part with the information for more than a year. However, the key difference between then and now is that of course the third runway was not the subject of a very large piece of primary legislation that aims to bring radical change to our NHS and that the information we are being denied could be very relevant to our deliberations. I have already written to the noble Earl about this matter and intend to follow the same route as my right honourable friend John Healey MP by putting an FOI request in for the most recent risk register about this matter. I urge other noble Lords who share my concern to do the same. The reason I am doing this is because the Secretary of State suggested yesterday that the version of the risk register that my right honourable friend John Healey asked for would now be a year out of date. I regard that as both a glib and disrespectful remark. The Minister told the House on Monday that most of the information from the risk register is included in the impact statement that was published when the Bill arrived in the House. Can the Minister say exactly how much of the risk register is contained in the impact assessment and how much is not? Perhaps the Minister might assist the House by publishing the information that is not contained in the impact assessment but is in the risk register. The Government say that this is a very secret document, but also that it is available. I am sure that the House would like to know which it is. Finally, there is a course of action open to the House, which is to refuse to resolve itself into a Committee on the Bill as an expression of its concern about this matter. I have discussed this course of action with several noble Lords, and we have a genuine dilemma here. Many feel that it is a very serious error to refuse to place this information at the disposal of the House when we are considering this important Bill. On the other hand, we are all aware of the amount of work that there is to be done on this Bill. I do not intend to divide the House today, but I reserve the right to come back to this issue if it is not resolved at least within the time allotted by the judgment of the Information Commissioner. The Minister may also need to arm himself with the information contained within the risk register, because I, for one, will be asking him, at all the appropriate moments in the debates to come, whether that issue is mentioned in the risk register and what it says.