Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Rooker has said, I have an amendment in this group that is precisely the same as his, except that it was directed at a different point. My noble friend has made a strong case for this particular dimension of addressing environmental health issues, but there is also the wider issue of the lacuna in the Bill, as has been touched on. There is one major shift that the White Paper, the post-pause White Paper and now the Bill are driving for: the shift of public health, including environmental health, to local authorities. However, the Bill itself reflects very little of that. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in response to the group of amendments before last, referred to the fact that work was being done on it and said that she hoped this would see the light of day fairly soon. The establishment of Public Health England as part of the department-cum-executive agency is hardly reflected in this Bill at all. The issues that relate to the respective role of the local authorities, to which my noble friend Lord Greaves has referred, are not reflected in this Bill at all. We have a major shift, going back to pre-1974, that makes public health the responsibility of local authorities. We have a recent history in which all the expertise in environmental health departments has been seriously squeezed because the requirements are mostly non-statutory. EHOs have been diverted on to other issues. We are coming into a further famine of local authority funding. The local authorities will be receiving this new public health responsibility at a time when their total resources are being squeezed and restricted and other priorities are impinging. Before this Bill completes its course, we need greater clarity on how public health and environmental health responsibilities are to be carried out; what the structure of them is going to be; what the co-ordination among local authorities, and from the centre to the local authorities, is going to be; what the exact role of Public Health England is going to be; and, frankly, at least some broad indication of how that is being resourced.