Health and Social Care Bill

I return to my noble friend Lord Warner’s intervention. In the case that he mentioned, it was I who was summoned before the Health Select Committee to explain what we were going to do about the problem. We intervened and told the SHAs that they jolly well had to sort this out. I do not see, under the arrangement that he is proposing, who on earth is going to be able to intervene. As the noble Lord, Lord Owen, suggested, I suspect that an intervention against Health Education England will be very rare indeed, in terms of being able to be comprehensively assured that HEE had failed in its duty. Indeed, there is surely a risk that if you have a narrow quango, such as HEE, solely concerned with education and training, it will not be concerned about resource issues or about the duty of the Secretary of State to promote or assure a comprehensive health service; only the Secretary of State himself can come to conclusions about the overall direction of the health service; only the Secretary of State can balance the conflicting demands of education, service provision and resources. There is a great danger of seeking to push all these responsibilities offshore, because when trouble comes—and trouble will come—it will be the Secretary of State whom the public and Parliament will expect to intervene. At the moment, I cannot see how, under this system, if things go wrong, they are to be put right.