Edward Argar
MP for Melton and Syston · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I will not keep the Committee long. I am very pleased to see the hon. and gallant Gentleman, the Minister, still in post, as this is a policy area that he has cared deeply about throughout his life. I share the broad support for the instrument expressed by the shadow Minister, my hon.”
“I appreciate it may be set out in the 2006 or 2025 primary parent legislation to these draft regulations, but if he can, I would be grateful for a little clarification. Finally, paragraph 10.1 of the explanatory memorandum refers to the legislation being continuously monitored.”
“I live in my patch and I know that there will be genuine local fury at the contempt this Government have shown for my constituents in approving a Leicester city land grab, which has cross-party opposition locally.”
“Lady was right to highlight in her remarks the importance of timely discharge from hospital as a key element of whether we can achieve that flow into hospital beds and have hospital bed capacity to allow an A&E department or emergency department to function.”
“That should not be a challenge; I suspect that that data is already extant in some part of the system. She is proposing a very moderate measure, which would pull all that together in one place, and allow it to be focused on and looked at in the round, rather than in disparate little penny packets of data.”
“Gentleman’s point, however, that with many of these things—both clinicians and coroners grapple with this—it is often complex to determine the actual most significant contributory factor. My hon.”
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“I appreciate it may be set out in the 2006 or 2025 primary parent legislation to these draft regulations, but if he can, I would be grateful for a little clarification. Finally, paragraph 10.1 of the explanatory memorandum refers to the legislation being continuously monitored. If the Minister can offer a little more flesh on the bones as to how that monitoring takes place—whether it is by serving officers, his Department or Ministers—I would be grateful. Like my hon. and gallant Friend, I support what the Minister seeks to do with this statutory instrument.”
“I will not keep the Committee long. I am very pleased to see the hon. and gallant Gentleman, the Minister, still in post, as this is a policy area that he has cared deeply about throughout his life. I share the broad support for the instrument expressed by the shadow Minister, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Exmouth and Exeter East. I have only two questions, and I appreciate that the Minister may want to write to me afterwards for clarification; I am perfectly content for him to do so. On paragraph 5.3 of the explanatory memorandum, I would be grateful if he could set out to the Committee, now or subsequently, what the definition of “competent person” is and what that constitutes.”
“I live in my patch and I know that there will be genuine local fury at the contempt this Government have shown for my constituents in approving a Leicester city land grab, which has cross-party opposition locally. I have been clear throughout, as have my local councillors and my residents, in our opposition to a Leicester city land grab that will take county communities such as Syston, Thurmaston, Queniborough, Barkby and Beeby into the city and see local residents paying more tax for almost certainly less in the way of services. I continue to oppose what the Secretary of State has announced today, so I have a simple question for him: what makes him think that the views of the Labour Leicester city mayor are worth more than the views of thousands of my constituents?”
“I fear that the genuinely positive benefits of what my hon. Friend is proposing might be somewhat diluted by virtue of what the Government are doing.”
“That should not be a challenge; I suspect that that data is already extant in some part of the system. She is proposing a very moderate measure, which would pull all that together in one place, and allow it to be focused on and looked at in the round, rather than in disparate little penny packets of data. That is a very reasonable proposition. The only challenge that I see is, sadly, in proposing it for integrated care board areas. Were the ICBs still what the Conservatives had conceived them to be—a number of geographical areas mapping on to an upper-tier authority social care provider—that data would have been even more meaningful, because it would have been more granular. The risk with the mergers and acquisitions—for want of a better phrase—among ICBs to form ever-larger areas is that that granularity is increasingly diluted.”
“I agree with the broad thrust of the points made by the hon. Member for North Shropshire in highlighting the impact of corridor care on patients, on families and on those seeking to provide the care for those patients. I suspect that pretty much all of us, in our own lives or as constituency MPs, will have come across examples of that and the impact that it has on our constituents, or on our friends and family members, so it is a very important point. Before I turn to new clauses 12 and 56, I will briefly address new clause 84, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham. It is a very moderate and reasonable proposal, in that it seeks simply for data to be made available and published on where 12-hour-plus waits in A&E have contributed to avoidable deaths.”
“Corridor care is, for want of a better way of putting it, a subset, a consequence, of a much broader systemic challenge. The Minister will probably know this as well; when I was first appointed to her job, one of the first conversations I had in the context of secondary care was about the importance of flow through our acute hospital systems, from a patient either presenting at A&E or arriving by blue light at A&E, to being treated, and the ability of A&E to function through those patients being seen, treated, and discharged or put into a hospital bed to become an in-patient. The ability to achieve the latter is dependent on the ability to discharge.”
“Gentleman’s point, however, that with many of these things—both clinicians and coroners grapple with this—it is often complex to determine the actual most significant contributory factor. My hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham may correct me, but I think that is why she framed new clause 84 as she did, to allow for that degree of a lack of total certainty in such contexts. Nevertheless, the hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point. I can see what the hon. Member for North Shropshire is seeking to do in new clauses 12 and 56: not unreasonably, she seeks to cast light on the impact of corridor care on patients, families and those caring for people. My only challenge would be—I will enlarge on this in a little more detail—that a narrow focus on corridor care, while understandable, slightly loses the bigger picture.”
“The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point, and I suspect that he has seen this issue in his professional career. Often, when a death occurs in a clinical setting, multiple factors are contributory. I think that that is why my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham framed this as she has, as “a contributory factor”—not the sole factor or the individual most significant factor, but that it could reasonably be deemed by a clinician or by those collecting the data that the long wait contributed to the death, because had that patient been seen, for example, in two hours rather than 12 hours, better clinical outcomes might have been achievable. I take the hon.”
“I would be grateful if the Minister could update the Committee on the latest daily figure for how many patients who are medically fit for discharge are still in an acute hospital bed. Perhaps, when the hon. Member for North Shropshire winds up on this group, she might be able to address the ambulance point—she addressed the social care point, but I would be grateful for her thoughts on ambulances.”
“I worry that, although the new clause has the best of intentions, the way the system might react and the impact on ambulance handovers and the ability of ambulances to pick up patients might have been overlooked. That is not a reason not to try to solve the problem of corridor care, but we must acknowledge the ambulance part of the challenge in A&E and emergency care, and encourage and incentivise the system to work as a whole to solve the problem, rather than focusing purely on the ED. In saying that, I acknowledge that the hon. Lady has referenced social care, step-down beds and community care, which are all hugely important, and I listened to her speech with interest, as I always do her contributions.”
“Arguably, that is less safe than corridor care, for two reasons: first, because the ambulance is not able to offload and be available in the community again and, secondly, because although corridor care has negative consequences, none the less in a hospital corridor there is a consultant or clinician very nearby, should a medical crisis occur. That is better than someone being in an ambulance in the car park—or waiting at home, having called an ambulance that is not coming, and not having their condition assessed because the ambulance is still holding a patient that a trust does not want to admit, in order to avoid congestion and corridor care.”
“I fear that the Government’s direction of travel may have rendered subsection (4) redundant, but I do not disagree with the intention, because I think she and I both share a view on the importance of healthwatch groups and the value that they bring locally to our healthcare system. While I can see the point about waiting 12 hours from arriving at the hospital to being taken into A&E, but the new clause does not reflect how the system might seek to manage that. It does not explicitly reference ambulance handover times and waiting times. A challenge we have seen in the past is that, in a desire to avoid hospital corridor care, some trusts have not admitted patients from ambulances until they feel that they could manage them in the hospital.”
“I can see that she is seeking to make the experiences of those undergoing corridor care and their families real to Ministers, who will be accountable. I gently say that I suspect that the Minister and her boss, the Secretary of State, are only too aware of the consequences of corridor care. Such patient experiences very much weigh on them as Ministers, as they did on me and others, day in, day out. We were always very cognisant of them. I can see the hon. Member for North Shropshire’s intention with new clause 12(4), where she suggests that Healthwatch should be involved in helping put such a tribunal together.”
“The single biggest factor, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire has alluded to, was the availability of step-down or social care provision, so that patients could safely go home or to another NHS or care facility and be looked after. We managed to get the delayed discharge total down from 13,000 at a given time to about 10,000—possibly just a bit under. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what the current total is for beds occupied by those medically fit for discharge at a given time. I see where the hon. Member for North Shropshire is coming from with her suggestion of a tribunal comprised of a mixture of people to interrogate the figures and interrogate the Secretary of State.”
“Lady was right to highlight in her remarks the importance of timely discharge from hospital as a key element of whether we can achieve that flow into hospital beds and have hospital bed capacity to allow an A&E department or emergency department to function. I looked at this issue four years ago, so the situation may well be very different today, but post the pandemic I inherited about 13,000 acute beds across the system occupied by patients who were medically fit for discharge, but whose discharge had been delayed due to a variety of factors. Some were because hospital pharmacies were not open through the night to provide the drugs when patients were signed off to go home; some were because of the unavailability of patient transport; some were because all the necessary clinicians were not present to sign in the appropriate order.”
“The hon. Lady pre-empts me— I am afraid I have rather a few more remarks to come to. I planned to through the subsections and paragraphs of her new clauses to acknowledge exactly that. For example, in proposed new clause 56(4), she highlights capacity, and in proposed new subsection (5) she mentions Baroness Casey’s independent commission and the need to pay heed to it. All that is important, but my slight fear relates to the drafting. While the new clauses note such factors, they do not necessarily reflect the overall interdependency of all parts of the system. I believe that what the hon. Lady seeks to achieve is perfectly reasonable, but I am not convinced by how the new clauses are drafted. The hon.”
“Does my hon. Friend recognise the statistic that between 1997 and 2007, the then Government closed 32,000 hospital beds—more than double the number closed between 2010 and 2022? That is when the big reductions took place, and they failed to put in place an expansion of community beds to match that.”
“The hon. Gentleman will probably be aware of the King’s Fund report from late last year, which covers the years 2010 to 2025. It highlighted that the growth rate was only 5% for managers during those 15 years, but 94% for children’s nurses and 55% for doctors, and other groups had similar increases. We are seeing investment and workforce increases in the right areas. It is right that we acknowledge, as I suspect the hon. Gentleman will, that the one group where we have not seen that same growth is community health visitors and community health workers. Alongside the massive investment and increase in doctors in the past 15 years, that group, and the role it plays, deserves focus from whichever party is in government.”
“4, Q2.] We are talking about moving an effective organisation into another organisation which, quite apart from whether the merger is appropriate given their different remits, is—by the review author’s own admission in evidence—basically not in a fit state to receive those new functions. I think that has been tacitly acknowledged by the Minister in saying it will only be done at an appropriate time, when the CQC is ready. Therefore, why make those changes at all? At the moment, it does not look like the CQC will be ready, at least in the near future, based on the evidence we have heard.”
“Before addressing specific concerns about the approach being adopted with the abolition of HSSIB, I want to highlight a real challenge with—even if one accepted the premise, which I do not—where it is proposed the functions are transferred to, as my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon set out. Dr Dash said in her evidence that the CQC “still has a way to go, and we all need to acknowledge that.” She went on to say: “I would have hoped that, by now, many of those challenges had been addressed. Some of them have been, but some of them have struggled.” –– [ Official Report, Health Public Bill Committee, 16 June 2026; c.”
“I was asked to focus on six organisations”. –– [ Official Report, Health Public Bill Committee, 16 June 2026; c. 5, Q2.] Only six out of 150? That does not ring true. That is not a tidying-up of the landscape but a very narrow focus. When the Minister comes to her concluding remarks, can she answer who specifically determined those six organisations for Dr Dash and told her to look only at those, ignoring the other 144-plus organisations? We all know that what a review comes up with is, to a large degree, determined by the scope set for it. By picking a mere six out of 150-plus organisations, I fear there is a risk that the scope has effectively, to a degree, stacked the outcome of what would be looked at and what would be concluded.”
“Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, who I always listen to with great interest on these matters, highlighted that patient safety should be at the heart of this legislation. That is absolutely right, but patient safety goes hand in hand with the confidence of those working in the system to speak out and put forward evidence that will improve patient safety. It is not an either/or; one is complementary to the other. It is important that this safe space remains, because that provides the conditions in which patient safety can be improved. In her evidence during the first session of this Committee, Dr Dash stated that she found more than 150 organisations operating in this space when she undertook her review. However, in Hansard , she went on to say: “I was asked by the Department of Health and Social Care to look at that landscape.”
“The thread running through his remarks, which is particularly important in this context, was trust. People who have had something go wrong and have reported a problem need to trust that it will be looked at independently and dispassionately. I fear that what is proposed here results from a deeply misguided decision, which has at the heart of its logic a fundamental flaw. As the hon. Member for North Shropshire set out, the decision fails to recognise that HSSIB’s role is fundamentally different from the role of CQC. It is an independent investigator; it is not a regulator or an enforcer, yet that somehow seems to be conflated in what the Government are trying to do here. They have simply failed to make a logical case for the change. The hon.”
“I am particularly keen to speak on clauses 59 to 63, because HSSIB was a key part of the Health and Care Act 2022, which I took through as a Minister. At that time, I was grateful for not only the fearless and tough questioning from the now Minister, who was on the Opposition Benches, but for her support. She said: “HSSIB is a really important new body” –– [ Official Report, Health and Care Public Bill Committee, 19 October 2021; c. 564.] She also said that it is a “new and important body, which we are all desperate to ensure works well.” –– [ Official Report, Health and Care Public Bill Committee, 19 October 2021; c. 566.] It is fair to say that it does work well, as my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon set out clearly in his detailed remarks.”
“It is the NHS itself, its inertia, its unwillingness and the Department’s unwillingness to take them forward in a coherent fashion—to drive the recommendations through and monitor whether they have been delivered on by the NHS.”
“The crux of some of Dr Dash’s arguments appears to be that there are, as the Minister also alluded to, too many recommendations being made and that it is a complex landscape. Yet HSSIB, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex set out yesterday, has made 56. He went on to say that the 30 or so public inquiries and other investigations have delivered 1,400, so it simply does not follow that HSSIB is the problem in that complex landscape. What was made very clear by, again, my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon is that, of course, the concern is not the recommendations. It is not the organisation making the recommendations that is responsible for the fact that they are not implemented.”
“She went on to say: “As the Bill sets out, the CQC will appoint a responsible person who will decide whether the case matches the criteria and whether it warrants information sharing outside the safe space.” And this is the crux of it: “That person is likely to be the CQC’s chief executive officer.” —[ Official Report , 6 July 2026; Vol. 789, c. 147.] That is an inherent conflict. If the person who is the head of the regulatory body is making the decision on whether information should be disclosed by HSSIB in its folded-in form, that will do nothing to inspire confidence in disclosure and the safe space provisions. I fear that drives a coach and horses through some of the arguments being made that there are sufficient safeguards within this merger to ensure HSSIB can continue as it has done thus far.”
“The CQC, of course, has a legal duty to act on information it receives, but that risks being conflated here. I saw this illustrated last night, for example, in the Adjournment debate, in a comment made by the Minister’s colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Birmingham Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), when she was responding to my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex. She was talking about the criteria for disclosing protected information outside the investigative function. She said: “Those criteria set a high bar for any disclosure—as high as it is currently with HSSIB—and the CQC will publish further guidance setting out much more detail.” This is the key point.”
“Members have set out, it sadly appears to contain a number of errors and assumptions that are inaccurate, which I will turn to in a moment. The fundamental challenge is to establish a way for people to feel confident and trusting in challenging a culture of denial and blame. We have seen this most recently in the context of maternity failings and scandals. The need for that safe space, and for an organisation able to challenge the institutions, is very clear, and I fear that this change actually weakens the ability to do that. Dr Dash’s review, I fear, fails to fully recognise just how important the safe space concept is—not just in how it is drafted and framed legally but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon said, in how it is perceived by those who need to use it.”
“My hon. Friend the shadow Minister is right to highlight, for want of a better way of putting it, the cumulative challenges that will potentially be piled on the CQC, on top of the pre-existing challenges with how that organisation is functioning. I read with great care the Adjournment debate that took place last night in the Chamber, which has been referred to by a number of hon. Members, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex, and I pay tribute to him for his work in this space. I worked closely with him in the context of the passage of the Health and Care Act 2022, and I know that the issue of patient safety is fundamental to what he seeks to improve and achieve in this House. I agree with him: I fear the Dash review simply fails to make the case for those changes. Also, as hon.”
“The challenge so often is that the provider organisations are marking their own homework and are simply not getting to the truth, or being as candid with those who have made the complaint as they have a right to expect.”
“That Act does not limit HSSIB investigations to individual incidents. If I recall correctly, in some of the debates on the HSSIB clauses in the Bill, we alluded as a Committee to the need for it to be able to look beyond individual incidents and try to draw out common themes. What has been said simply does not accord with my recollection of the purposes of the legislation. Again, my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon highlighted this. Recommendation 3 states: “Most investigations into safety incidents should continue to be managed within provider organisations”. That is the real challenge here. HSSIB’s independence is what allows it to range across the piece—to have issues raised with it and look at individual organisations.”
“I do think that the scope of the review, who determined the six organisations and how that was looked at is important, and I am sure that the Minister will be able to clarify that when she makes her concluding remarks. However, there are a couple of other issues that concern me in terms of some of what was in the review, which seems to be the basis on which this is being done. Finding 6 suggests that HSSIB has expanded its “scope of work beyond the original remit.” It goes on to say: “HSSIB was originally established, along the lines of safety investigatory bodies in other industries, to look at specific cases or incidents of severe harm, but it has since broadened its work into making more systemic recommendations.” I have to say, as the Minister who took the Health and Care Act 2022 through, that is simply not the case.”
“Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket said, that safety is patient safety and that has to remain the golden thread that runs through everything we are debating. Whatever difference of perspective we have on this set of clauses, that must remain at the heart of what we are looking for.”
“The hon. Lady makes her point extremely clearly, and I do agree with exactly the point she makes, because in any organisation it is a big step for an individual employed by or working in the organisation to make a complaint about their organisation or to whistleblow on something that has gone on or that they feel has not been got right. Key to getting people to do that is that they feel safe and empowered to do it in the public interest, and that is exactly what is at the heart of the air accidents investigation branch and the rail accident investigation branch model, so that the information is brought forward and learnings can be driven by it to improve safety for everyone. As the hon.”
“My hon. Friend is rightly highlighting the importance of independence, and trust in the independence, of the organisations investigating failures and making recommendations. Does he agree that that is only half of it? Those organisations are not at fault when recommendations are not implemented, so the other half of this is that the NHS and the system need to act on those recommendations when they are made.”
“I genuinely worry that what we see here is the continuation of a theme that has run throughout other aspects of this legislation—a theme of centralisation, of removing independent external challenge and bringing it inside the system, be it the Department or the NHS. When that happens, my fear is that the people who will lose out will be the patients, whose voice will no longer carry as loudly.”
“It would all be kept in-house in the Department, part of a closed process that would not alter decision making in reality, because that is already happening in the Department. The Department should already be looking at reports from Healthwatch England as part of decision making by Ministers and senior officials. What this simply does is remove the independence. It weakens that voice by making it something that happens within the Department rather than in the public sphere because, quite rightly, those officials will not be able to have their own independent voice out there, irrespective of the leadership of the NHS or the Minister.”
“That is where, for me, the challenge with what is proposed comes in, because a new directorate in the Department, staffed by civil servants, will simply not be able to do that. We all know that those who work in a Department, however excellent they are, report upwards ultimately to the permanent secretary and to Ministers. They are answerable to the political leadership of the Department. Would they be able to decide that something was coming through regularly from patient feedback and publish it independently, without ministerial approval or that of the permanent secretary, or hand it to the media? Would that director be able to champion the patient voice by going on television, irrespective of any ministerial approval? The reality is, of course, that they could not.”
“I will confine my remarks to group 47, conscious that the next group will give us an opportunity to discuss local arrangements, so I will stick to the national ones. We are all aware of the significant role that Healthwatch England plays, as well as its popularity and the trust that many people place in it. As a former Minister in the Department, I was on the receiving end, on occasion, of some sharp—or firm—suggestions from Healthwatch England, but that is what it was there for. It was there to be the grit in the oyster. It often made useful suggestions, and its independence meant that it could put reports not only to me but to the public—it published them. It could give them, for example, to my hon. Friends who served on the Health and Social Care Committee and, if it wished, go to the media to make sure that that voice was heard.”
“As with my reflections on clause 64, I genuinely fear that in this weakening of patient voice, particularly at a local level, the patient will be the loser because the system will continue to do what it wishes to do. It will do its consultations, and it may have a director of patient experience at an ICB level, but they will be working for the ICB; they will not be there as an independent voice to challenge the ICB—including publicly—on what it is doing. I hope that the Minister reflects further on the real diminution, if not the neutering, of patient voice that comes with some of these arrangements. As always, I look forward to her reflections when she winds up.”
“But it is not for Healthwatch to take action to fix the issue; it is for the ICBs and the NHS to act on those recommendations. We are proposing to give the bits of the system that have failed to take action and fix the issue not just the responsibility that they already have but the responsibility for reflecting patient voice. The one bit that is working—where patients’ voices are heard—is the bit that we are getting rid of. We are not seeking to fix the bits that have real pressure and genuine levers to compel an ICB to act on those recommendations when they are made independently, rather than simply marking its own homework.”
“I fear that this is a fragmentation of those links at a local level and the weakening, if not silencing, of a patient voice that can challenge publicly and ensure that what patients need to have said is genuinely said. Being in the room does not mean that that voice is heard or acted on, as shown from the examples I have spoken about: there is a consultation exercise, the view is reflected on, and the ICB does what it was going to do anyway and does not change its position. I have genuine concerns about the loss of an independent patient voice in a local context. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but I think she made the point in her opening remarks that we have lacked not recommendations and suggestions for changes but action to fix the issue.”
“Given that mergers and acquisitions are getting even bigger, ICBs are moving further and further away from what was conceived: for them to have the same geographical footprint as the upper-tier local authority providing social care, to ensure that the two organisations spoke to each other and were better integrated. Removing the representative from the local authority that provides that healthcare from the board, even if they are replaced with a mayor, does not bring about the reconnection with social care provision that is so central. Removing the voice of general practice or primary care from the ICBs again moves that independent challenge away from the system.”
“My concern is that we will see less grit in the oyster and patient voice, and more managerialism in the NHS ICB system. We heard from the hon. Member for North Shropshire and the shadow Minister about the challenges there would be, even were that patient voice to happen. Given the Government’s 50% cuts to ICB budgets, which are already impacting frontline services, ICBs will not be able to take on additional responsibilities without the funding that they need. That is quite apart from the principle that they should not be marking their own homework. I fear that “system knows best” will become the default. We have also heard about the geographical challenges.”
“Given that that voice in the room came from a consultation exercise led by the ICB, it seemingly did not make a jot of difference to the outcome or decision, or to whether the patient was heard. On the impact of local authority scrutiny panels, the NHS ICB in Melton previously recognised the need for increased GP provision in the town due to the increasing size of the town and the long waiting times, but just recently decided to reverse that position and say that it did not see the need for that. Members of the scrutiny committee, across all parties, were absolutely clear that they disagreed with that decision, but did that get listened to or make a jot of difference to the ICB? No—the ICB did what it was going to do anyway and changed its mind.”
“That measure brings things entirely within the system and removes the independent voice, which is exactly what this clause also does. The ICB is the voice of the NHS system, not the voice of the patient. We need the grit in the oyster that is provided by an independent voice talking to the ICB. Being in the room with an ICB will not mean that the patient voice is heard more loudly or clearly, or that it will be acted on—it is probably more likely to mean that it is not. As an example from my constituency, the ICB did conduct a consultation exercise on the proposed closure of St Mary’s birth centre in Melton Mowbray, the response to which was overwhelming: the patient voice said that they did not want that to happen. That response was fed into the ICB, but the ICB did what I fear it planned to do all along and closed the centre.”
“Clause 65 and schedule 10 focus on local healthwatch arrangements. As I said when speaking to the previous group of amendments, Healthwatch is respected and trusted at a national level, and that is even more the case at a local level. I fear that the Government seek to remove something that works, that is effective and that ensures a strong patient voice in the system. It simply does not work to have integrated care boards take on those responsibilities, as they will be marking their own homework rather than being the independent patient voice. It is a little like the discussion the Committee had during the previous grouping on HSSIB, in which it turned out that the CQC will be able to investigate itself, but the chief executive of the CQC would decide whether any protected disclosures could be published during that investigation.”
“Although it is important that we have appropriate protections and scrutiny, when we are procuring services and technology for the NHS we should be looking for the most effective and best tools that have those safeguards but can do the job that eminent surgeons and clinicians need them to do in order to do their work for patients.”