Government response to the House of Commons Health Committee report on public health (twelfth report of session 2010-12) PDF Download
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Author: Great Britain: Department of Health
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780101829021
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
Government response to HC 796-I, session 2010-11 (ISBN 9780215562050).
Author: Great Britain: Department of Health
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780101829021
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
Government response to HC 796-I, session 2010-11 (ISBN 9780215562050).
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Health Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215562050
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
The Government plans major changes to the public health system in England. These will affect all three domains of public health: health protection (addressing environmental threats to population health); health improvement (tackling health inequalities and lifestyle issues impacting on health and wellbeing); and healthcare public health (applying public health expertise to the provision of healthcare services). A new dedicated public health service, Public Health England (PHE), will become operative from April 2013. The Committee believes the PHE must be visibly and operationally independent of Ministers. Major new responsibilities for public health will also be assumed by local authorities, but the Committee finds that the lack of a statutory duty on local authorities to address health inequalities in discharging their public health functions is a serious omission in the Government's plans. The Committee also call for: the Secretary of State for Health to be given an explicit statutory duty to reduce inequalities in public health as well as to protect the public from dangers to health; the DH to set public health budgets, both nationally and locally, that take account of objective measures of need; the Chief Medical Officer to give professional leadership in respect of both the medical and public health professions; the Government to review its opposition to proposals on regulation of health professions; the role of the Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to be clarified.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215047328
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
The current Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACoBA) lacks adequate powers and resources; does not have appropriate membership for its function; and should be abolished. Instead, the Committee says, Government should legislate to establish statutory ethics regulation with a code of conduct and enforceable statutory penalties, overseen by an independent ethics Commissioner. The new Commissioner would also take over the role of the Prime Minister's Adviser on Ministers' Interests - who advises on ministerial conduct. PASC also renews their call for the power to initiate investigations into the Ministerial Code on his or her own initiative. Enforceable statutory penalties should be introduced for failing to comply with the Commissioner's recommendations. Government reforms are implementing increasingly close working between public servants and the private and voluntary sectors. Changes to public service delivery - including the outsourcing of public sector functions and the active promotion of "interchange" between sectors-are blurring the boundaries between the public sector and other organisations. This could present greater opportunities for public officials to use their position for personal gain, and may give rise to public concern about the probity of former, and serving, public officials. The Committee says that ACoBA's procedures are "opaque" and not helpful to departing public officials who may need guidance about what appointments may be regarded as inappropriate for them to take up and does nothing to deter misleading and damaging mis-reporting of individual cases
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215047441
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
The evidence is still that honours are more likely to be awarded to civil servants and celebrities than to people who volunteer in their local community. The Committee heard that the process of awarding honours remains opaque, even to the Queen's representatives in the counties, the Lords Lieutenant. PASC calls for an increase in the proportion of people receiving honours for work in their local community, rather than to those who are awarded for their work as civil servants and in the wider public sector. This report sets out proposals to increase accountability and transparency and strengthening the link to the Monarch. These include: the introduction of an independent Honours Commission to consider nominations (a repeat recommendation from the last parliament); that the Prime Minister's "strategic direction" over the honours system be removed; a rebalancing of the proportion of honours awarded to civil servants and public sector workers, and volunteers in their local communities; that longer citations should be published, explaining the reason for awarding an honour; that the Lords Lieutenant should have an opportunity to consider and comment on all nominations for an honour within his or her lieutenancy; and that the Cabinet Office set out proposals for broadening the range of people who take up roles as independent members of the honours committees. The Committee also recommends, considering the decision to strip Fred Goodwin of his knighthood, that the Honours Forfeiture Committee be made independent and transparent, with clear and expanded criteria for forfeiture, chaired by an independent figure, such as a retired high court judge
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215561787
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 74
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Book Description
This report forms the Committee's response to Sir David Normington's consultation on reforming the regulation of public appointments, and looks at further issues relating to the recruitment and pay of public appointees. The Committee welcomes the broad thrust of Sir David Normington's proposed reforms, including the proposal to streamline the existing Code for Public Appointments and to adopt a lighter touch in regulating the public appointments process. It particularly supports his commitment to broadening genuine diversity in public appointments. The Public Appointments Commissioner, however, should be given a new remit to review Departmental appraisal systems, to ensure that underperformance by appointees is consistently addressed and that appointees who are not up to the mark are not reappointed. The Committee also supports the establishment of a government Centre of Excellence for public appointments, which would have the expertise to widen the pool of candidates applying for vacancies. Given their cost to the taxpayer, the Government should reduce the use of recruitment consultants for appointments to public bodies. Substantial savings could be made through utilising and developing the capabilities of existing human resources units in Government Departments and through the establishment of a Centre of Excellence. There is concern that the post of manager of top talent in Whitehall (Director General for Civil Service Capability) has effectively been abolished and its functions dispersed. This post should be re-established.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215049452
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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The Public Administration Select Committee says special advisers (SpAds) should be 'men and women of standing and experience' with a legitimate and valuable function to play in government, but they need better training and support to prevent future problems and misunderstandings about their role and conduct. Ministers must recognise that they have responsibility, not just accountability, for the conduct of their special advisers, and actively ensure that they are fully aware of what their advisers are doing in their name. The Committee says that it remains concerned that this responsibility has 'proved to be more theoretical than actual' and says it cannot recall any minister ever resigning over the conduct of a special adviser, despite some astonishing cases. PASC says that the special advisers' role protects the impartiality of the Civil Service, by performing tasks which it would be inappropriate for permanent, impartial officials to perform, and helping to ensure that the Government's policy objectives are delivered, but that ministers must be able to justify that the tasks they undertake are in the public interest. Despite concerns raised by PASC's predecessor Committee more than ten years ago, the training and support for new special advisers remains inadequate. The Committee makes a number of recommendations including that the PM's Adviser on Ministers' Interests should be empowered to instigate his own investigations of potential breaches of the Ministerial Code, so that the Prime Minister is not able to protect his ministers from appropriate investigation of the conduct of their advisers, and that the PM's Adviser should himself be independently appointed and subject to a pre-appointment hearing
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215561565
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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The Coalition Government has set a sizeable challenge for the Civil Service: to transfer power out of Whitehall and into communities and as a result fundamentally change the way it works. The Committee found that while the Government seeks to embrace change, they have failed to recognise the scale of reform required or to set out the change programme required to achieve this reform. The lack of coordination from the centre and strong political leadership will result in the failure of key policies like the 'Big Society' agenda. The Committee recommended a comprehensive change programme articulating clearly what the Government believes the Civil Services is for, how it must change and with a timetable of clear milestones. This change programme must also include proposals for the Civil Service to retain and develop the new skill sets required to meet the demands of the Big Society policy agenda, and address long-running concerns about the decline in specialist expertise in Whitehall, the failure to innovate and take risks, and the failure to work across departmental silos. The reflect the changing role of the Civil Service, the Committee has also recommended that the Government should consider the development of a new Haldane model of accountability or they must explain how the model remains relevant. The new realities of devolving power out of Whitehall to local government and elsewhere should be codified in the Civil Service governance structure.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215042781
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 74
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"Administrative justice" includes the procedures used by public authorities for making decisions in relation to individual people, the law that regulates decision-making, and the systems (such as the various tribunals and ombudsmen) that enable people to challenge these decisions. There are around 650,000 administrative justice hearings each year - more than three times the number of criminal justice hearings - and it is estimated that resolving citizen's complaints costs central government over £500 million per year. The functions of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council (AJTC) include keeping the whole administrative system under review and considering ways to make the system accessible, fair and efficient. The Government proposes to abolish the AJTC using powers in the Public Bodies Act 2011, and to give its functions to the Ministry of Justice. It is expected to bring forward the necessary secondary legislation later this year. The Committee finds that the Government's rationale for winding up the AJTC is questionable, that the Ministry of Justice may not have either the resources or the expertise to take on its functions and doubts the level of cost savings that the Government estimates will be achieved. The Committee also recommends that the House of Commons Justice Committee take its findings from this inquiry into account when it considers the Government's proposed legislation.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780215043375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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In this report the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) considers the role of the independent adviser on ministers' interests and concludes that role is not independent in any meaningful sense. The adviser on Ministers' interests advises Ministers on compliance with the Ministerial Code and carries out investigations of alleged breaches of the Code when requested by the Prime Minister. The report highlights the lack of independence in three areas: the role: the independent adviser lacks independence in practice, as he is appointed personally by the Prime Minister, is supported from within the Cabinet Office, and cannot instigate his own investigations; the appointment process: the closed process by which the adviser is appointed is not suitable for an 'independent' role; the choice of candidate: the choice of a recently retired senior civil servant, Sir Alex Allan, is not a suitable choice for a role which requires demonstrable independence from Government. PASC started the investigation after recent resignation of the former Secretary of State for Defence, the Rt Hon Dr Liam Fox: regrettably the then independent adviser Sir Philip Mawer was not consulted in the course of the events leading up to the resignation of Liam Fox. The retirement of Sir Philip shortly after the resignation of Dr Fox provided an opportunity to demonstrate the value the Prime Minister places on having complaints against Ministers investigated in a demonstrably independent way, but this opportunity was missed and the appointment of Sir Alex only became public knowledge after the event.
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Public Administration Select Committee
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 0215070895
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
How complaints are handled determines the quality of the relationship between consumers and public services. The best performing organisations welcome complaints as a way of engaging consumers. A failure to recognise the importance of complaints leads to insufficient redress for the individual, limits the impact that complaints have in improving services, and alienates the public. In some parts of public services, there are encouraging signs of increased attention to good complaints handling. However, Government as a whole cannot be said to be complying with best practice in complaints handling or adapting to the needs and expectations of today's citizen. Success depends on the right leadership. The Committee recommend that: there should be a minister for government policy on complaints handling; the primary objective of the Cabinet Office review of complaints handling in Government should be to change attitudes and behaviour in public administration at all levels in respect of complaints handling; in respect of complaints from MPs handled by ministers, replies must be accurate, clear and helpful and with no sharing of confidential information or delegation of responsibility for responding; the Government should create a single point of contact for citizens to make complaints about government departments and agencies; and the Government should provide leadership to those responsible for various parts of administrative justice, to ensure that there is a clear and consistent approach to sharing, learning and best practice.
