My Lords, I do not have any direct professional interest in the subject at hand, but as somebody who lives in London and needs dental care, and as a parent, I am grateful to those dentists and midwives from all over the world who have provided me with excellent service through the years. We should be grateful to them all.
From these Benches we also broadly welcome the order the Minister is putting forward. It is clear that we should make it possible for all suitably qualified healthcare professionals to practise in the UK and it is, frankly, a waste of an individual’s talent and a detriment to public interest if there are unnecessary delays or barriers to registration. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, described dentists coming here from countries such as Ukraine and Afghanistan who can make a significant contribution, and we need to enable them to do so rather than disabling them from doing so.
Of course, there are necessary checks to protect patient safety, but what we are saying with this statutory instrument is that we believe that the professional bodies, such as the General Dental Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council, are the bodies most competent to determine what those checks should be and to set out the right testing and assessment processes to allow applicants with overseas training and experience to apply their skills here. In this debate I have learned a lot from the detailed experiences of the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, Lord Harris of Haringey and Lord Patel, about what this means in practice. It seems to me to be the right decision that we should empower those bodies even further and give them the flexibility that they need to be able to adapt over time as circumstances allow, balancing out the need for safety but also the need to get people on to the register as quickly and reasonably as possible. We agree with the Government on the broad thrust of these provisions and that the additional flexibility is important.
I raise one question with the Minister. Do the Government have any criteria in mind for assessing whether this change has been successful? For example, have they looked at the cost and speed of applying to register before and after the additional flexibility is granted and after the new processes are brought in? The noble Lord, Lord Harris, correctly reminds us that this will not be immediately, but certainly over this multiyear process, if we are to make this change, it would make sense to look at the situation before and after. I note that paragraph 14.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum points out that the instrument itself has no monitoring provisions, but with any legislative change it is helpful for that to be the case, and I hope that the Minister will be able to describe some criteria that the Government have internally for deciding whether this has been successful.
Finally, I end on a note of caution about the safety standards. Sadly, something will go wrong; somebody will be registered in future who should not be registered. When that happens, the fact that we are all supportive of this today means that we will all own that decision, and we should not say that this is wrong because of a single bad case. Overall, we are making the correct decision. The correct risk assessment is that we trust bodies such as the General Dental Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council to make decisions.
As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, correctly pointed out, this is part of a process; we will be going further, and other professional bodies will be given similar flexibility. That is the right decision now and will be the right decision in future. Even if and when something sadly goes wrong under the new procedures, as I said, we will need to remember that, overall, we took this decision because we wanted to see more of those people—the kinds of people from whom I have certainly benefited—on the registers in the UK providing the professional services that they can.