The House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform
Committee has today published a report on the Health
Bill in which it recommends provisions in the Bill to ensure
privacy protections for the proposed single patient records
should be specified on the face of the Bill and not left to
Ministerial discretion via delegated legislation.
The Committee's recommendation is in line with the principle it
set out in its seminal Democracy Denied
report, that the principal aspects of policy should be on the
face of a bill and only its detailed implementation left to
delegated legislation.
The Committee acknowledged that the protections in the Health
Bill as regards single patient records include that the Secretary
of State must have regard to the need to ensure that adequate
safeguards are in place to prevent the improper use of
information. However, this safeguard is not a duty to ensure that
adequate safeguards are in place. It is merely a duty to have
regard to the need to ensure that such safeguards are in place.
The Government's justification for the use of these powers is in
part due to the pace of likely technical change. Nevertheless the
Committee distinguished between allowing some flexibility to
allow for technological change with the core principles governing
access to the single patient record.
The Committee says principles governing (a) who should have
access to what material and when, (b) under what conditions and
(c) subject to what transparency, confidentiality and privacy
safeguards, are properly matters for primary legislation. The
speed of technological advance is not a reason for excluding
important matters of principle from the Bill.
The report states that the core access and confidentiality
requirements of the single patient record should be set out in
primary legislation rather than being relegated to regulations
and that Clause 52 of the Health Bill that introduces the
provisions does not address the core access and confidentiality
requirements of the single patient record is not currently fit
for purpose and, in the absence of significant amendments, should
be removed from the Bill.
Commenting of Camden Town, Chair of
the Committee, said:
There can be few things more sensitive or deserving of proper
protection than our personal health records.
The proposal in the Health Bill to introduce single patient
records has the potential to improve people's experience of the
health service, as clinicians have access to accurate and
up-to-date information on their patients. But that must be
accompanied by assurance that the data is secure and only shared
with appropriate bodies.
Our role is to inform the House of Lords when we believe
important aspects of proposed laws should be set out in the Bill
itself for full scrutiny, rather than waved through with the
detail to follow. In this case, we believe the protections and
confidentiality requirements for the single patient record are
too important to be left to regulations and should be included on
the face of the Bill.
Notes to Editors
- The role of the DPRRC is to scrutinise proposals in bills to
delegate legislative power from Parliament to Ministers or other
bodies. Bills will often include clauses delegating the power to
make future changes to the law through secondary legislation,
limiting the level of scrutiny Parliament can apply to those
future changes. For more information, please see its webpage.
- In its reports, the DPRRC draws the attention of the House of
Lords to clauses where these delegated legislative powers are
proposed and highlights when it believes the proposed delegations
to be inappropriate. The Committee does not take a view on the
possible merits or disadvantages of any policy or change to the
law.
