Health and Social Care Bill

I thought there was going to be an intervention from my left. I was not going to intervene in the debate on this group. I am sorry if I missed something by missing the debate on the first group of amendments. I have some concerns about the dual role of Monitor as the arbiter of foundation trust status and the raft of new duties that it will undertake as an economic regulator. Let me make it clear that I have no problem whatever with the role of Monitor as the economic regulator and the functions that go with that. However, I want to share with the Minister and the House some of the previous Government’s thinking on whether Monitor could combine being the economic regulator and the arbiter on the passage to foundation trust status. The situation, if anything, is more difficult now. We finally concluded that we could not make Monitor the economic regulator until we were much, much further along the path of completing the job of trusts becoming foundation trusts because there were potential conflicts of interests, which we will come to later. I raise this issue at this point because there are accountability issues here as well. I can see the very strong arguments—and I have every sympathy with the Government on this—for setting up an economic regulator and the Secretary of State not dipping in and out of those functions. If you are going to have a regulator, let it be independent and leave it to get on with the job. I am very comfortable with that. My concern is that we are already going to be loading a very large number of functions on to this economic regulator, and to expect it to carry on, even with Chinese walls, as the arbiter on foundation trust status is a big ask, given that most of the promising candidates for foundation trust status have already jumped over the bar and we are getting down to the ones that have been finding it rather difficult to jump over the bar. That could be because the Government have set themselves the target of 2016. We set ourselves targets of 2008 and 2012, and quite a lot of trusts have still got nowhere near jumping over the bar, so I certainly would not bet the farm on them all having cleared the hurdles by 2016. Monitor, in its role as the arbiter on foundation trusts, needs to keep a very close eye on those that have cleared the bar and to intervene when it needs to. The Secretary of State is actually embroiled in that process. The cases have to be cleared by the Department of Health and the Secretary of State before they go on to Monitor. That is a long-established process. The Secretary of State is going to become involved to some extent if trusts lose their foundation trust status; they go back into the pool in a sense. We are now dealing with a situation that is much more difficult financially and much more challenging than it was under the previous Government. We are trying to get Monitor to do an even more difficult job with the most difficult trusts in an extremely difficult climate and to take on the job of being an economic regulator. There are real issues about whether that can be done and about separating out the areas where the Secretary of State has a legitimate role. It is legitimate for the Secretary of State to have a presence in the build-up to a foundation trust application and when a trust loses that status. However, that set of issues is separate from the accountability issue when Monitor performs the role of an economic regulator. Will the Minister share with us some thinking about how those separate functions will be handled in the real world that we will face over the next three to five years?