Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I support this amendment because I believe that it is a sincere attempt by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, to help the Government out. I do not intend to repeat the arguments that we had a few days ago on Report about placing on institutions a rather stronger statutory obligation to inform patients where mistakes had taken place, partly because we have had that debate. During that debate, the Minister repeatedly expressed the view that the objectives of the amendment could be achieved by placing a contractual obligation on organisation to do this. This amendment quite simply requires that that contractual obligation takes place. I am assuming, therefore, that the Minister will accept the amendment, because it does exactly what he said he wanted to do in his previous speech. The amendment also expresses the concerns raised by a number of your Lordships in Committee and one or two on Report that perhaps placing the duty and obligation directly on organisations and the individuals involved would be inappropriate and that that would provide too rigid a framework. However, as the amendment does what the Government said would solve the problem, I hope that the Minister will indicate that he is happy to accept it in this form. The reason why I think that it is helpful to the Government is, as may not have escaped the Minister's attention, a certain amount of criticism of the Department of Health and of this Bill is prevalent at the moment. For example, a letter was published in the Telegraph this morning which said: "““The Coalition Government promised to ensure greater NHS accountability to patients and the public. We believe this aspiration has now been abandoned””." That was signed by a large number of people active in representing the interests of patients around the country. It is not specifically about this issue; it is about an issue that we will come on to very shortly in terms of HealthWatch. But there is a very widespread concern that, despite all the rhetoric that we have heard from the Government about ““no decision about me without me””, that aspiration has been lost in this Bill. Part of the way of getting patients to have confidence in their health service is through the knowledge that if something goes wrong the fact will be shared with them. The Government said that they did not want a statutory obligation to be placed on individuals or institutions to do that, but they said that they would like contractual arrangements to be put in place. This amendment makes sure that those contractual arrangements are put in place, and I would have thought that the Government would want to accept it so as to demonstrate that even now there is some good faith left around their desire to put patients at the centre of the NHS changes.