My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 77 standing in my name. I have taken a slight different approach from that of my noble friend, but I was out of the traps a little before him. I was trying to do something slightly different, but I am equally happy
with his rather more elegant amendment on the duty of candour. Whether I have got the wording of the amendment right is another matter, but I was trying to link the organisational responsibility for a duty of candour to the registration process. Therefore, that right at the outset, as a condition of registration, the organisation had to sign up to the idea of a duty of candour.
When one is in the patient’s position, the duty of candour in relation to the employee becomes very important. The patient sees individual people, not necessarily something called an organisation. On the other hand, for the reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, mentioned, one has to provide cover for individuals who operate in that organisation, both to protect them from unreasonable attacks by the victim of the mistakes, but also from attacks by the employer for blowing the whistle on them. In this amendment, I am striving for an obligation on the employer—the provider of the services—to have a duty of candour as part of their registration conditions. At the same time, the employee should be protected against unfair employment practices or unfair criticism. One is then forced along a path—which is not fully explained in my amendment—where the contract of employment between the individual and the employer gives some protection to the employee who blows the whistle.
That is quite complicated stuff and this is a complicated area, but we have to strive not just for organisational candour, but for some protected way for the employee to level with people when things have gone wrong. I think the secret lies somewhere in the contract of employment. We do not want that routed only through doctors. In a care home, for example, it will not be the doctors talking to the residents, their families or whoever. We need to do more work on this. Given that this was such a high-profile issue in the Francis report I, like my noble friend Lord Hunt, find it surprising that we are not trying to deal with it in the Bill, complicated though it is. We need to put some wet towels around our heads to try to find a way of capturing this in the Bill, so it is both fair to the employer and to the employee. That is what I am trying to do. Whether I have succeeded in my simpler version in Amendment 77 I am not sure, but that is the thinking behind it.