NHS reforms: Speaker to decide whether to grant debate on risk register

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/mar/19/nhs-reforms-debate-risk-register

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The Speaker, John Bercow, is deciding whether to stage an emergency Commons debate on the publication of the NHS risk register instead of the scheduled final day of the health bill before it is sent for royal assent.

The Speaker is due to respond to a request from the shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham. If he allows the debate to go ahead, it will probably ensure the bill will not receive royal assent before the information rights tribunal has detailed its reasons why the risk register should be published. With the budget being announced on Wednesday there is a packed parliamentary timetable and little opportunity for government business planners to squeeze in another Commons debate on the NHS.

The same issue is set to be debated in the Lords on Monday afternoon where Lord Owen, the former SDP leader, will call for the bill not to receive royal assent until the NHS risk register is published.

An information rights tribunal ruled last week that the NHS risk register should be published, but the government has said it cannot decide whether to comply with the ruling until it has seen the reasons behind it. The decision was made by Prof John Angel, principal judge at the tribunal. He is racing to publish his reasoning. The government can appeal on a point of law, but not on fact.

It would be a serious political blow for the government to have to defer completion of the bill's parliamentary passage.

John Healey, the former shadow health minister who has pursued this issue for months, said: "This would be a big political blow for the government at the very end of the 11th hour of the bill. The Commons would probably have to deal with the bill after Easter."

Healey made the original freedom of information request for the risk register in November 2010, and has argued the case with the government, the information commissioner and the courts.

The information commissioner and the special court have both ruled that the government must release the risk register. The government has been reluctant to release the document and has not ruled out using its special veto on publication (only used once before, to veto release of the attorney general's legal advice on the Iraq war).

Ministers argue they cannot release the risk register because they fear it will jeopardise civil servants' forthright confidential advice to ministers. There is also a fear that the public will not understand the risk register and will mistake a worst-case scenario for a prediction.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the former cabinet secretary Lord Wilson warned that publication would mean officials would be forced to "pull their punches" when giving advice to ministers, and could be drawn into politics.

Wilson, who was the UK's most senior civil servant for four years under Tony Blair's government, said publishing the transitional risk register on NHS reforms could do "lasting damage" to the civil service.

Wilson said if the register was published the precedent would "reverberate across government" and that it would be a "major blow", with freedom of information in his view already "harmful to the process of government".