argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Electoral Registration — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: International Affairs
Edward Julian Egerton Leigh (Conservative, Centre-right): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. You talk about the main act, but is this not an appropriate overture for the main act? After all the Scottish people are determined to stay in the Union precisely because they want to maintain Trident.
Scottish Representation in the Union — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
William Nigel Paul Cash (Conservative, Centre-right): The right hon. Gentleman is overlooking several points. The first is the question of unfairness to the English voters. That is the key issue. Secondly, he asserts that there will be two classes of Members under our proposals. It is not about two classes of Members but two different functions. It was his Government and his party leader in 1996-97 who created the devolution arrangements without making proper recompense for the unfairness to the British voter. That is where the problem lies.
Scottish Representation in the Union — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: International Affairs
William Nigel Paul Cash (Conservative, Centre-right): Does the Secretary of State agree that the proposals that were agreed to tentatively by the Conservative party yesterday will not necessarily be the solution, because the real problem is that the new Parnell from Scotland, in the form of Mr Alex Salmond, will come down and use any opportunity relentlessly and ruthlessly to create as much chaos as possible, and thereby disrupt the United Kingdom?
Scottish Representation in the Union — House of Commons, 2015-02-04
Topic: Government Operations
Edward Julian Egerton Leigh (Conservative, Centre-right): It is important in this debate that we learn more about the Liberal plans for the proportional representation of MPs. It seems, with respect, that they could end in a really bonkers situation. What would happen if the Green party got 5% of the votes but only one MP? Would the Green party lady walk through the Lobby representing 20 other colleagues? What would happen if the Labour party got 38% of the popular vote but 43% of MPs? How would it be worked out in practice?
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Law and Crime
James Arbuthnot (Conservative, Centre-right): I like my hon. Friend’s suggestion. In Committee on Tuesday, he and I discussed the value of having legislation that is comprehensible to the people whom it affects, and this Bill will affect everyone in the country. The laws we make should not be written in gobbledegook that is not comprehensible to the people who own and enforce the law and who have it enforced upon them. It would be an improvement if the legislation referred to an ombudsman, because that is what everybody calls them, so I hugely support my hon. Friend’s suggestion.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Nuttall (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend says that complainants will be less concerned if they are kept informed during the progress of an investigation, but on my reading of his new clause 2, there is no requirement on the commissioner to keep them informed, merely to give them an estimate of the period of the investigation at its outset.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
James Arbuthnot (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend has spotted a deep lacuna in my new clause, of which I am conscious. He is quite right, as I would expect of someone with his forensic skills. There is not, however, any need for legislation, in the way my hon. Friend suggests, to require the ombudsman to keep the complainant informed because, as far as I can tell, the ombudsman already does her best to keep complainants informed. In relation to the changes that the ombudsman is making in modernising the ombudsman process, which we will no doubt discuss on Third Reading, she is going out of her way to start a public consultation to ensure that the changes are as friendly to the public as possible.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Michael Davis (Conservative, Centre-right): Eric Forth’s principle No. 4 is that laws should be minimalist: there should be the absolute minimum amount of law that there can possibly be to get the outcome one wants. In considering the Bill, I was concerned that we must not tell the ombudsman how to manage her business, as it were, particularly since the current ombudsman is doing an extremely good job of accelerating the process, dealing with more cases and dealing with them more quickly. I wondered for a while whether even this Bill was too much in terms of putting a force up behind it, but then I thought that there is not always the same ombudsman with the same energy level. The Bill will give a guarantee to the public and is therefore worth while. I was careful not to give instructions to do it in this way, that way or the other way. It is much better to leave good management to the service, but to put a public guarantee into law.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
James Arbuthnot (Conservative, Centre-right): I have to say that I have received no information from anyone who has had such an experience. My suspicion is that if one went to the ombudsman and asked, "How long is this likely to take?", the ombudsman would say, "If you look at our last report, you will see that 99% of our cases were concluded within a year, so you can expect something roughly like that." New clause 1 is merely an attempt at transparency.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Nuttall (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that intervention, which leads me directly on to my second point. I suspect that if the commissioner is approached by a member of the public, or indeed by a prospective complainant who has it more immediately in mind to make a complaint, all that will happen is that the commissioner will say, "Without a lot more information about the nature of your complaint, I can do no more than look at our history of dealing with complaints. If you look in the annual report or consult our website, you will see that 99% of cases are concluded within a year; to put it another way, there is one chance in 100 that your complaint may still be outstanding after one year." Of course, that does not give the whole picture, because the ombudsman’s annual report states that it was able to conclude 67% of cases within one month. Therefore, two out of three cases are dealt with relatively speedily, which is probably as good as one would expect to find anywhere. Few complainants would expect their complaint to be dealt with faster than that.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
James Arbuthnot (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is right to say that there is a one-in-100 chance of a complaint taking more than a year to be dealt with, but I should perhaps have said that there are only about three chances in 100 of a complaint being dealt with at all, because so many of them are outside the scope of what the ombudsman can look into in the first place.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Nuttall (Conservative, Centre-right): That is right, and it prompts a question about whether some advantage is to be gained by the commissioner providing more help at the initial stages to try to signpost people. Indeed, the annual report states that the ombudsman receives about 40,000 contacts a year, including queries about where and how to complain about public and non-public services. Of those 40,000 contacts, 27,566 were inquiries for the commissioner, which demonstrates that many members of the public will quite innocently contact the commissioner about matters that do not fall within her responsibilities.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Michael Davis (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) has presaged Eric Forth’s principle No. 5, also known as the law of unintended consequences, for which reason I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) will treat his new clauses as probing rather than substantive. One of the risks has already been talked about—that of imposing more work on and therefore slowing down the process of the ombudsman—but there is another one that my right hon. Friend and I, having been in the House for some time, will be used to: where legislation sets prices, targets or whatever, the minimum can become the maximum and the maximum can become the minimum. If an ombudsman’s staff member has to provide a prediction of the likely time it will take to resolve a complaint, not only are they likely to be cautious and, as my hon. Friend said, tick "12 months", but they might say, "Well, until 12 months comes up, maybe I shouldn’t issue the report at all, in case I discover something I didn’t think of before." It could thus have exactly the opposite consequence to that which my right hon. Friend intends.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Michael Davis (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes, there are laws of nature and there are laws of man, and in Eric Forth’s case, there are forces of nature which sometimes are the forces of man. It is a wonderful paradox, but given that it was my right hon. Friend who provoked me to conjure the five laws, I blame him, not myself My right hon. Friend made a very thoughtful speech, and perhaps met Eric Forth’s sixth law, which is that all this has to be tested—that is the point of this House, and it was Eric Forth, more than anybody, who insisted that we did not just shovel through, sausage-like, a set of laws because the Administration or some pressure group wanted them, but that we tested them, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North has been doing that this morning This reform is likely to be the first of a number picked up by the Executive, not by us. The Public Administration Committee is looking at this, the Department of Health is looking at it, the ombudsman’s office itself is looking at it, and the Cabinet Office is also looking at the issues raised by my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend. The Executive will be aiming to minimise the number of times complaints are turned down out of hand; to minimise the number of times people are told, "You’ve got the wrong department. Complain to somebody else"; and to minimise the constraints on the ombudsman’s office that might not permit it to intervene; and they will also be aiming to deal with the resource issue. It seems to me that we do not need to solve those problems. It is for the Executive to do so properly in Executive time, with debate going on across the Front-Bench teams. It is for them to deal with that; we are dealing with a simple problem here.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): When my right hon. Friend discussed the Bill in Committee, he contemplated the prospect of introducing amendments at this stage to reflect the outcome of the deliberations taking place in government and elsewhere. In the light of the Government’s failure to deliver a timely response, how much confidence does he have that they have the will to do this?
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Michael Davis (Conservative, Centre-right): A lot of confidence. I do not wish to pre-empt the Government’s forthcoming announcements, but neither do I want to push them into doing anything ill thought through. If the law of unintended consequences applies to anything, it applies to Government legislation—more than anything else. I am confident that this will happen, and in a way that will command support across the House. As my hon. Friend knows, it may be dangerous to make a prediction, but I think there will be agreement. Whatever happens in the general election, I believe these reforms are coming.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): Unlike quite a lot of organisations, the ombudsman is accountable to this House. If the ombudsman were experiencing the difficulty to which my right hon. Friend refers, I would expect the ombudsman, the chief executive or chairman to contact my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) and say that they wished the Public Administration Committee to look into the matter and put pressure on the recalcitrant Department. In a sense, my right hon. Friend is saying that, because we may have customers—if that is the right expression—who are minded to delay things, we should facilitate enabling them to delay things beyond a year. We need to focus on who the real customer is. The customer is the person who has made a complaint, and whose complaint has been accepted for investigation by the ombudsman. In my view, they are entitled to have a decision on that complaint within 12 months, which is why I put in this statutory duty.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): It occurs to me that, for once, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) is wrong. If a public body failed to respond to the ombudsman, it should be found against and that would be quite a penalty and an incentive not to procrastinate.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): I do not go along with that, I am afraid. It is rather like saying that we should encourage the maximum number of complaints against something, engaging bureaucracy and taxpayer expenditure to deal with the complaints, to give some perverse satisfaction to the people who want to say that the Government service, in this case the health service, is doing a good job. If we want to measure consumer satisfaction with public services, there is a much more direct way of doing it than looking at how many complaints against their services have been made and rejected By way of an aside, one difficulty with the ombudsman service is that it cannot take on complaints from public sector organisations. In my constituency, for example, a head teacher of a school that was unfairly done down by Ofsted was told—or it was implied—that he could complain to the ombudsman service, but the ombudsman service deemed his complaint to be outside its scope. Although he is an individual, as he is the head of a school, Ferndown upper school, the complaint is regarded as coming from a public organisation and therefore does not come within the scope of the ombudsman’s rules. I would prefer to see the scope of the ombudsman to investigate issues widened, while keeping a focus on complaints that are prima facie likely to be well founded, to going down the road of saying that we should have many more complaints and that when we reject those complaints it means that the public services are doing very well. That is where I would disagree with the ombudsman service’s strategy, which is to try to maximise the number of complaints When people make complaints, it often involves quite an effort on their part and they normally make them on the basis that they expect a positive result. They do not make them hoping that their complaint will be rejected, thereby endorsing the national health service, local government organisation or other body for performing in a way that did not result in the complaint against them being justified. The best organisations are organisations that have no complaints against them and I should have thought that that was what we should be aiming for—a health service in which there were no complaints, or in which all the complaints were dealt with long before they came before the ombudsman Those are my amendments. I shall leave my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) to address his amendments 1 and 2. If some of these amendments were accepted, I think the Bill might have some worth and value.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes an absolutely brilliant and incisive point, because has not the whole lesson of the past five years been that public services have been able to deliver more with less? That should also be true of ombudsmen, and therefore the amendment is otiose.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Nuttall (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my hon. Friend. That has indeed been the lesson of the past five years, and we have seen some sparkling examples of people in the public sector doing more with less—our police service, for example. The same is true of the ombudsman. They have said that they have lowered the threshold and changed the way they work in order to try to meet demand so that fewer inquiries from the public are turned away.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Nuttall (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend has achieved his wish I think that what is set out in amendment 5 would fall into a set pattern, with the commissioner saying every year, "Well, if you gave us a bit more money, we’d have a few more staff and things would get better."
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): With the greatest respect, I think that my hon. Friend misunderstands the amendment. The idea is to increase transparency so that rather than the commissioner being able to complain sotto voce that this is all because they do not have enough money, that would have to be brought into the open, and then the very points that he and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) have been making about the ability of many public sector organisations to get a lot more bang for their buck could be exposed to public debate.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Michael Davis (Conservative, Centre-right): Following that point from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), I think there is a risk that the amendment would transform the role of the Public Administration Committee, which currently provides oversight and acts as the guardian of ombudsmen, turning it into a champion for more money. I think that would be quite dangerous. I do not want to see the Committee go from being a regulator, comptroller and holder-to-account to a champion for more money.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Nuttall (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that point, which I suspect adds weight to my opposition to amendment 5. I appreciate what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has said about transparency, but I suspect that in press releases and in evidence given before the Committee the ombudsman would be able to do that anyway. When questioned about the reasons for delays, they would feel that they could easily say whether it was down to resources, either in public utterances to the media or more formally in evidence to the Committee.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
David Michael Davis (Conservative, Centre-right): I am not sure that the legal liability relates simply to the person bringing the complaint. It could relate to other people too, such as those contracting services. It also relates very much to reputation. Someone may, in effect, be asked to make a confession according to a timetable, which is not a good idea in a statute I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) in his critique of amendment 5. On amendment 4, I would leave that to practice guidelines, rather than putting it into law. It is dangerous, as I said earlier, to create lots of onerous responsibilities in law. The aim of the Bill is to exert pressure and give a degree of public guarantee, not to try to tell the ombudsman how to cross every t and dot every i. The one amendment with which I felt some sympathy but am still uncertain about is amendment 3. I presumed from the Bill that the ombudsman’s department would respond close to the 12-month point when it knew that it might go past it. Earlier, it is likely to have to adjust the timetable; later is not tolerable. I am uncertain whether it may lead to perverse or unintended consequences if we do exactly what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has proposed. I will have to think about that. The Bill has to go through a Lords stage. I ask my hon. Friend not to press the amendment today, but I give him an undertaking that I will look at the matter closely and see if I can come up with a form of words that I can suggest as a change in the Lords; I will let him know if I am not able to do that.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): May I thank everybody who has participated in this debate and my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), the Bill’s promoter, for his generous offer to at least consider amendment 3? I do not mean to be churlish, but it is a problem that we are debating the Bill on the penultimate private Members’ Friday. If my right hon. Friend were to choose, on reflection, to incorporate amendment 3 in an amendment in the other place, he would, in effect, jeopardise his Bill, because we would then have to consider it again after it had been amended. The Minister has indicated her potential support, so perhaps she would like to intervene on me to guarantee that, should that eventuality arise, the Government would give the Bill the necessary time to ensure that it was not frustrated by that process but reached the statute book. I must say that I am tempted to press amendment 3 to a vote, because it might be easier to include it in the Bill now rather than have a promise that something will be done later. One could sum up this debate by saying, "Excuses, excuses, excuses." It is so easy for public sector organisations to make excuses about why they cannot meet particular time limits.