My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 122 and 123, to which I attached my name. The first is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the second in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege. They have both introduced these very clearly, so I will make only three points to add some extra, different perspectives.
The first point I wish to make is that there is what I can describe only as a heart-rending report in the Guardian today about Windrush compensation two years on. The headline talks about
“long waits and ‘abysmal’ payouts”.
The story mentions an agency that talks about five people waiting more than 18 months for compensation. If this—as high-profile a scandal as we can possibly imagine, which attracted far more attention than the issues covered by the report from the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege—is going so badly, surely we have to address this issue, which in many ways is smaller,
more limited and perhaps much less complicated, to create a situation via Amendment 123 to deal with these three issues. Amendment 122 would create a situation to deal with all cases, so that we would have a system and framework that, I hope, would do better than the Home Office is doing. I hope that such an agency in the health framework would not suffer from the same hostile environment in the Home Office that the Windrush compensation scheme has to act within.
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My second point comes partly from the fact that I spent part of this morning at the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Legal Aid’s inquiry into the current condition of legal aid. If one were to apply a medical term to it, a fair description would be “in critical condition in intensive care”. Legal aid is enormously overstretched and our courts are enormously overstretched. Ideally, we should be in a situation where very few people who are victims of medical malpractice or medical misadventure, or of commercial interests overweighing the medical, have to go to court. We need an automatic system. If we just look at the practical point, putting philosophy to one side, we have a court system that is in no position at the moment to deal with these situations. We want to take them out of the court system to take the pressure off.
My third point picks up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in response to the Minister’s answer on the previous amendment. I think it can be summed up as—this may indeed be a direct quote—“If not now, when?” I believe Parliament gets through, on average, 30 Bills a year. If we do not do this now, with all the pressures of Brexit, the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the economic struggles we face, when will we find the space and time to do this again within that 30-Bill limit? This has to be the time—this is the place and this is now the opportunity. This has been thought through and worked through by the noble Baroness and her team. Let us just do it.
That is my contribution on these amendments. I want to take a second, if I may, because this is my final contribution on the Bill, to say that, particularly due to the clashes with the internal market Bill, we have been a very small group of people carrying an enormous load. I attempted to make my very small part a contribution towards that with my particular interest coming from the environmental side, the feminist side and a concern about patients and patient safety that reflects my personal experiences and my family background. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions and for their patience with me. I am aware that I have been in your Lordships’ House for only about a year, so I still very much feel as though I have my learner plates on. I am working my way through and trying to work out the best way to contribute. I thank all noble Lords. I would love to say that we will not need to be back again, but I fear we will.