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NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc) Bill

I rise to speak to amendments 1, 3 and 2, which—inexplicably, given their strength—stand in my name only, as well as the splendid amendment 9 and the unfortunate amendment 4. It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Madam Deputy Speaker. In my experience, debates with you in the Chair are often the most efficient and good natured. I hope that today’s debate will be just that.

On amendment 1, when one tables an amendment, it is a great pleasure to have one’s speech made for one much more eloquently than one could make it oneself, so I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) for his support. Recently, there have been significant charitable scandals in this country. Much of the time of the House and of the Public Accounts Committee has been taken up with Kids Company. I have become convinced that one of the phenomena at work in that organisation was group-think. Those hon. Members who are students of psychology will know of the phenomenon of group-think: individuals in a group, often when they are led by a charismatic leader, can get lost in a miasma of consensus, in which they are unwilling or unable to acknowledge any view that departs from theirs, and indeed are hostile to outside views of their conduct.

The most famous political example was the Bay of Pigs disaster: the group around President Kennedy became trapped in group-think. We have seen commercial examples of it in the UK. Marks & Spencer and British Airways got trapped in group-think in the 1980s, when they went for massive international expansion. They did so against the views of everybody on the outside, but both boards convinced themselves that it was the right thing to do. Disastrously, Kodak and Swissair, which was once talked of as the “flying bank”, went bust because the management were unwilling to look for outside views.