Hunting the truth

Health targets to be measured

THE HIGH esteem in which cross- party Parliamentary select committees are now held was self- evident when a botched Government plan to impose a certain Chris Grayling as chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee backfired.

A political insult, it would also have compromised the integrity of these committees which have grown in stature thanks to their sound stewardship and unerring ability to expose the fallibility of Ministers and officials – the regret is that so many of their common sense pronouncements are routinely ignored.

These include the Health Select Committee which is today launching a new evaluation system in which Government progress on key health and social care targets will be judged by CQC- style ratings – the benchmark used to measure hospitals, care homes and so on. It certainly has the potential to hold Ministers to account more effectively – especially if they’re also required, by law, to explain themselves to Parliament when key targets are missed.

Yet here’s the irony. The committee is currently chaired by Jeremy Hunt who now accepts that he should have done far more to bring about lasting – and meaningful – social care reform when he was Health Secretary from 2012 until the summer 2018 and his elevation to the Foreign Office after Boris Johnson quit over Brexit.

Not only would he, and others, have been regularly censured if this format had been in place previously, but it is also doubtful that he would have been elected to head such a key committee and effectively judge his own homework – a concern of many that Mr Hunt has still to sufficiently dispel.