Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I had not intended to speak but I feel quite anxious that we are contemplating the prospect of not producing an amendment of the kind the Minister suggested he would be willing to accept. I understand the points made by other Peers. I am really conscious of the anxiety that has been expressed in the huge amount of representations, letters, e-mails and so on that we have had. A point about which I felt strongly at Second Reading is that our own Constitution Committee has indicated anxieties that I think are shared by a large number of people. We need to indicate we are going to take seriously the views of that committee. Many of the anxieties expressed may either have been caused by scaremongering or become totemic, but they none the less exist. Some of them seem not to be so ill founded. Other speakers have already referred to the fact that, as the Explanatory Notes state, the commissioning and provision of services will no longer be delegated by the Secretary of State, but will be directly conferred on the organisations responsible. As the Select Committee indicates, the Secretary of State must secure that, "““any other person exercising functions in relation to the health service or providing services for its purposes is free to exercise those functions or provide those services in the manner that it considers most appropriate””." There seem to be at least grounds there for anxiety that the Secretary of State may be seeking to offload responsibility. I hope that, however long it takes us during these discussions—after some of the discussion on the previous amendment, I became even more anxious about the role of the Secretary of State—we will be able to find a form of words that satisfies the anxieties expressed. I do not know whether that wording should take the form of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, or that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, but we should endeavour to allay that anxiety, because it is undermining an awful lot of interest in and support for other parts of the Bill.