This House of Lords debate broadly stalks about how inspectors of care home need better access to information.

On Amendments Nos. 91, 92, 93 and 94, I am sympathetic to the wish to strengthen the opportunities for residents of establishments to express their views to inspectors. Many noble Lords will have seen the recent television documentary, "Macintyre Undercover", which exposed ill-treatment of residents that had gone undetected by inspectors. In future we shall want to ensure that inspection methods are both sensitive, as I have said, and rigorous so that residents are enabled to express their views about their care in private and with the confidence that any concerns will be dealt with.

We have already commissioned work from the voluntary sector to help to improve communication between inspectors and people with learning disabilities, and to enable more service users to take an active role as lay participants in inspection.

We also intend that inspectors should actively involve relatives, friends and advocates of service users in the inspection process. Of course, staff in good homes will be, and have been, keen to enable this active flow of information. Any reluctance to help inspectors to acquire the fullest picture of what a home feels like to live in should, of course, prompt closer inspection. However, I am not convinced that the details of how those aspects of best practice can be built into

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inspection are best dealt with on the face of the Bill. They can be achieved through directions from the Secretary of State to the commission. I can assure the noble Lord that we shall give directions to the commission on those issues.
In relation to Amendment No. 95, in essence it seeks to formalise the contact between inspectors and persons present during an inspection in a way that would not be conducive to good relations between inspectors and operators of registered services. To my mind, to introduce the idea of independent representation for service users when an inspector is wanting to ask them for their views on the service being received suggests a completely different connotation from that intended. It seems to imply that the service user is making a formal statement, as if in a police interview, and needs representation to safeguard his or her interests.

That is the opposite of what this is all about. We want to enhance the resident's or patient's opportunity to speak openly and frankly. I am concerned that the amendment would have the opposite effect. Inspectors will want to gain an honest view from service users about the quality of care being provided and we cannot, and should not, want them to be inhibited from expressing their views by being prevented from speaking privately.

I return to a point I raised at the beginning. There are many ways in which skilled inspectors can put service users at ease and create informal opportunities for them to talk privately. We do not intend that the general process of gathering information should be carried out as if interviewing anyone for a job, but we want to ensure that inspectors can be firm if they consider that they are being prevented from talking privately by, for example, a manager hovering at someone's shoulder. Nor is it intended that employees, owners or managers should be grilled by inspectors. We want to ensure that staff can feel free to respond honestly to questions, which may include them being asked what induction and training they have had; how well they are supervised; whether or not they have access to the right equipment, and so on, that they need to do the job. Those are the kinds of issues that would be routinely covered on inspections.