[2nd Allocated Day]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. If he listens carefully to what I am saying, he will hear that I am developing an argument that will go towards answering that question. Rather than trying to answer it in a very small way now, I would rather answer it in a comprehensive way through reference to what I had planned to say to the House. As I was saying, hon. Members should ask themselves how the Secretary of State would be able to wash their hands of the NHS while simultaneously being legally required to deliver on all the duties I have just outlined. Crucially, the Secretary of State also retains the duty to promote a comprehensive health service, which dates from the Act that founded the NHS in 1946 and has been unchanged by this Bill. The Secretary of State will also have the duty to secure that services are provided for that comprehensive health service and he will have failed in that duty if they are not. The Secretary of State also has the ability—the obligation, in fact—to set goals and priorities for the NHS through the mandate. That will set out what the Secretary of State wants the NHS to deliver, which will be updated every year. It will be widely consulted on and Parliament will scrutinise it, giving Parliament a detailed say in what the NHS is tasked to deliver for the first time ever. The Secretary of State has further powers in addition to the mandate to impose standing rules by which the NHS commissioning board and the clinical commissioning groups must operate, which will be subject to scrutiny and control by Parliament—a power Parliament does not currently have. What is changing, however, is the Secretary of State's relationship with the NHS in terms of the role of Ministers in the commissioning and provision of services to the NHS. The Government believe that it should not be the job of Ministers to provide directly or commission NHS services, either. It should be the role of front-line professionals, who should have the freedom to focus on driving up quality of care, free from interference by Ministers in operational decisions—something that all parties in this House have said that they want to see. We understand that all Government legislation has a responsibility to foresee the unforeseeable, to ask questions about the worst-case scenario and to ensure that the answers stand up to scrutiny. That is why this Bill contains a number of back-stop provisions to make it absolutely certain that any future Secretary of State will not be able to turn a blind eye to failings of service provision, so we have ensured that the Secretary of State has the power to step in if the board, or Monitor, are failing to deliver on their duties, including any duties imposed on the board through the mandate. Finally, in the event of a significant emergency such as a pandemic, the Secretary of State will have powers to direct any commissioner or provider of NHS services.