Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I shall speak briefly in favour of these amendments, which would make HealthWatch England independent of the Care Quality Commission and strengthen its role so that it has the function of making recommendations, not just providing advice and information, to the Secretary of State, the NHS Commissioning Board, Monitor, the Care Quality Commission and local authorities. I emphasise that we are strongly in favour of HealthWatch England having the powers that will make it the powerful consumer champion for the views and experiences of patients, their families and carers that we want to see. However, we firmly believe that this will not be achieved if it remains a sub-committee of the Care Quality Commission—an important issue that we will return to on Report, and which we believe is crucial to HealthWatch England’s success as a public watchdog and patients’ champion that is able to make a real difference. My noble friends Lord Warner and Lord Harris have set out the arguments for this very strongly. I will not go over them again. They were indeed thoroughly aired in the previous debate anyway. The amendments in this group from my noble friends Lord Harris and Lord Rooker also seek to ensure that the Secretary of State consults local HealthWatch organisations before he or she gives a direction to HealthWatch England concerning its failure to discharge a significant function that it is required to undertake. We support this requirement. We also support the amendment requiring HealthWatch England’s annual report to be sent to all local healthwatch organisations. On the issue of how the committee of HealthWatch England is to be constituted, although we are supportive of its members being elected from local HealthWatch organisations—as also proposed by my noble friends—we will want to consider this issue more fully in the light of whether the full independence of HealthWatch England from the Care Quality Commission is secured. We also want to consider how we can ensure that members of both HealthWatch England and local healthwatch organisations, are more fully reflective of their communities in terms of gender, disability and ethnicity. A great deal more thought and work needs to be undertaken on this issue, possibly as part of the pathfinder healthwatch transition pilots. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s views on how this could be taken forward. I was going to comment on a number of other amendments but they have been thoroughly gone into by noble friends, so I will leave it at that.