Group 19: Citizen Voice Body — support for volunteers and staff (Amendment 44)

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 9:41 pm on 10 March 2020.

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Photo of Angela Burns Angela Burns Conservative 9:41, 10 March 2020

Thank you very much, Llywydd. Actually, Minister, you're quite right in some ways: you would expect that you wouldn't have to put on the Bill a protection about training. But unfortunately, we've done it because during the course of our negotiations, during Stages 1 and 2, and all our other meetings, which you've honestly and openly held with opposition spokespeople, you've watered down the role of the citizen voice body so much from where it was and you've changed the essence of the CHCs in ways that the people who work in the CHCs and the public that the CHCs represent really see and feel.

There's a real concern that we now have a CHC that could be based anywhere and nowhere, and definitely not in your area; that we have a CHC that doesn't necessarily have the right of access to go into certain places to find out what the citizen wants, to spot problems, to make changes; that we're out there trying to recruit a whole load of volunteers who won't necessarily have the protection from litigious other parties who might take great exception; that we're going have a body that may not have the strength to speak truth to the powerful NHS and the powerful social services organisations.

And that's why something as simple and as mundane as the training was put on the face of the Bill, because there are a great many of us in this Chamber who have been trying to fight a rearguard action to try to preserve some of that integrity, that independence and that strength for the CHCs, for the new citizen voice body. Because whatever we think about the citizen voice body, and whatever political objectives there may or may not be about it, it is ultimately the voice of the citizen. I think that, in this particular aspect of the Bill, at the end of this last amendment, which I'm asking the Chamber to support, Llywydd, you and your Government and your backbenchers have watered down the voice of the citizen.