My Lords, I think this has been an excellent debate. I fully accept, as my noble friend Lady Thornton said, that my Amendment 122 covers a much wider area than Amendment 123, which focuses on the specific issues relating to the report of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege.
My Amendment 122 was definitely a probing amendment, because the current situation in relation to clinical negligence is wholly unsatisfactory. It combines the bureaucracy and slowness which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred to in relation to Windrush and she is absolutely right to draw parallels. It combines a hugely frustrating process for patients and their relatives with a system that increasingly becomes ever more expensive for the NHS. The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, was not going to be drawn on these wider considerations, but the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord O’Shaughnessy, have both dealt with these—we know that it is a very complex issue, but surely, at the end of the day, we have to recognise that the current system simply is not working.
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I fully accept that the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, did not go into the wider issues of clinical negligence, nor do I think it is easy. It lends itself to work by the Law Commission perhaps, or even a royal commission, because those issues go much wider and are very complex and there are lots of different matters to be considered. However, from this debate, the Minister can take it that there is wholesale dissatisfaction with the clinical negligence situation as a whole. He might just reflect on that, in thinking through where the Government might go. I know that this view is shared by almost all participants in the clinical negligence field.
The noble Baroness’s recommendations are related to the specific patient groups covered by her report. As she said, she wants to look forward, but the people who she met and reviewed deserve redress as a moral responsibility. At the end of the day, that is right. Where harm has been done, especially when it is difficult to pin absolute responsibility on any particular individual or institution, there is systemic responsibility, which the Government have to bear. Before withdrawing my amendment, I ask the Government to look at this matter sympathetically, within the confines of the report by the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, but also in the wider area of clinical negligence. This has been an excellent debate, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.