Sir Edward, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. It is a great pleasure to support the Bill promoted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden, which is a timely reminder that these things matter. The case he described is well known to the Public Administration Committee, of which I am Chair. We have departed from the practice of previous Committees. We want to hear about cases that people feel have not been well handled by the ombudsman, because we learn from them. We do not take up those individual cases; we cannot possibly be a further tier of appeal in those cases, but we learn from them. We are receiving evidence of those cases as we speak, because we are conducting another inquiry, which I will come to in a moment.

I support the Bill, which merely places a reporting requirement on the ombudsman. It is important that we remind ourselves that the ombudsman is ultimately accountable to Parliament. The Public Administration Committee does its best to hold the ombudsman accountable, but the Bill does no harm. Indeed, the ombudsman herself supports the Bill and recognises that it is perfectly reasonable. It is important to see this case and other cases that have gone wrong in the context of the ombudsman service as it is. First, there has been a big financial squeeze in the public sector, and that has reduced the resources that the ombudsman has available. That has had an effect on morale and the effectiveness of staff.

Secondly, a big change programme is going on in the ombudsman service to deal with exactly such failures: a tendency to be over-cautious, to be defensive about criticism and perhaps to be less understanding of the criticisms of some of those it is seeking to serve than it should be.

These cases also highlight the need for reform of the ombudsman. The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish draws our attention to the fact that the Cabinet Office is conducting just such a review, in response to the report produced by the Public Administration Committee last year, called “Time for a People’s Ombudsman Service”. We are still working in a framework set down in legislation in 1967. We visited ombudsman services in other countries and gathered evidence. We are miles behind our counterparts. The Scottish ombudsman, Jim Martin, told us,

“the model in England is stuck in time. It probably was good for its time, but I think its time has passed.”

We are advocating reforms, such as the ability to receive complaints other than in writing and own-initiative powers for conducting investigations on widespread problems in the NHS. Sepsis and midwifery regulation are two examples that have been highlighted in this Parliament, where the evidence base from complaints has been used to make more general findings and present those to Parliament, exactly as the service is meant to do, but its powers to do so are limited and we need to expand those.

We also need to regard the requirement we are placing in clause 1 in the context of what is happening in the NHS. We are entering a period almost of glasnost in the health service, post-Mid Staffs, where people are expected to draw attention to the things that are going wrong. We are expected to learn from what is going wrong. That culture has not previously existed in the health service. Such a change programme in the health service is going to take some time, but I think it is happening rapidly in parts of the health service, which is a positive development. The result is a lot more complaints.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the ombudsman service does not oversee the NHS complaints system; it is the longstop when the local complaints system has failed and when the Department of Health has failed. When everybody else has failed, people are entitled to go to the ombudsman. It should be a backstop service and it should not become the place where every complaint can go, because it is not set up to do that. In a moment, I will mention a further inquiry I am conducting, after giving way to my hon. Friend.