Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:12 pm on 14 January 2020.
I'd like to associate myself with what Angela Burns and the Minister have already said in thanking all of those who have enabled this important piece of work to be done in a timely manner, which was essential. I suppose the Minister would expect me to say that we don't want to get into the habit of legislating in a rush, but there was a particular reason why it made sense to escalate this legislative process and we on the Plaid Cymru benches have been very happy to support that and to support the idea behind this Bill, which is, of course, to make the GP profession in Wales more attractive to young doctors and, indeed, to retain people in their careers. So, we're very happy to support the legislation today. We're very glad that the Llywydd has allowed the debates to be moved on as quickly from Stage 3 to Stage 4, and we're happy to support that.
When the Medical Defence Union began to raise some concerns with us, I had a bit of a sense that, perhaps, one wouldn't expect turkeys to be supporting the introduction of Christmas and that there may have been a bit of self-interest as an organisation in some of the queries that they were raising, and we did explore that with them in the committee. But I would associate myself with some of the concerns that Angela Burns has raised around the detail that will follow. The Minister may not be able to give us full answers today, and the reporting process that he set out, of course, will be helpful in that regard.
I won't repeat the concerns that Angela Burns has raised about the admission of liability, because one of the strengths of our medical profession is that they are answerable in a number of ways to a number of bodies when things go wrong or when there's an allegation that things have gone wrong. And we wouldn't want to build anything into this system that would make GPs reluctant to participate honestly. On the point about the duty of candour that is going to be introduced in new legislation, it would be ridiculous, I think, if one part of the Welsh Government was telling doctors, 'You cannot admit when something has gone wrong', let's say to an inquest or to the GMC, at the same time as telling them that we expect them to be candid and that we're placing, at least on public bodies—and some of us would like to see that duty of candour placed more broadly on individuals—. So, I'm sure there's no intention for that, but it would be helpful for the Minister to assure us today that he will be able to give those reassurances, similar to the ones that have already been given to the profession in England.
And the final point that I would want to make, Dirprwy Lywydd, is with regard to the nature of the report. It's extremely positive that the Minister has agreed to report annually in response to the Conservative benches' amendment, but we need to know what we're reporting upon and what we're benchmarking against. The Medical Defence Union have made some suggestions to the committee of some of those things: we might want to look at what the average cost of defending a claim is; we might want to look at the success rate of the claim handling. Now, I'm somewhat ambivalent about that because we wouldn't want to be saying that it's always the right thing for the doctor to be successfully defended, because sometimes the doctor will be at fault and should be found at fault.
But I think it would be helpful—I wouldn't, again, expect the Minister to be able to tell us this today—when the process is in place and the regulations are in place, it would be good for him to share with us what the benchmarks and the report are going to be. He may or may not want to respond to the points made by the Medical Defence Union. To the committee the Minister has generously said he'll be making an annual report too. We can't successfully scrutinise that annual report unless we're clear what's being measured, where we are at the beginning of the process, and what the plan is to improve performance against certain key benchmarks.
So, with that, I would join other speakers, Dirprwy Lywydd, in commending this legislation to the Assembly, thanking again my fellow committee members and members of the other committees who scrutinised this, and all the staff who have so ably, as they always do, supported us in the process.