Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I support this group of amendments. I want to make just a couple of points, as I think that most of the others have already been covered. I am looking at some information sent in an open letter from the Registration Council for Clinical Physiologists to Anne Milton, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in another place. Interestingly, in that open letter the registration council, which operates a voluntary register, takes the view that the council is rather toothless. It says that the professions covered by clinical physiologists will continue to be, "““saddled with a toothless system of voluntary registration, in which those managing the registers are exposed to unacceptable legal risk when attempting to enforce the meagre sanctions at their disposal and maintain professional standards””." It says it is evident that those administering the current inadequate voluntary registration process are being threatened with civil action by those whom they are forced to reprimand. It is a pretty poor state of affairs when those who are trying to enforce professional standards are themselves threatened with legal action. I know from talking to people involved with the registration council that people leave the register when disciplinary issues come to the fore. I gather that in one instance a person left the register when faced with discipline, emigrated to Australia, continued to practise and got in trouble there. As I understand it, the Australian statutory body that exists for clinical physiologists was astonished to discover that there was no statutory regulation in force in this country. I do not think that we can continue with this so-called voluntary system and light touch. We need to do what other countries do and have statutory responsibilities and statutory training and registration for these very important groups of staff.