Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, this is a very mixed bag of amendments. It is all about clinical commissioning groups but the issues behind such a mixed group are varied and it is quite difficult to get a coherent debate about them—although I do not criticise the Government Whips’ Office for attempting to push this Bill along a bit, given the speed it is going. I shall speak to three or four of these amendments. I totally agree with everything that my noble friend Lady Barker said, so I will say no more about that. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, started us all off with Amendment 59A, suggesting that, "““clinical commissioning groups … coincide with local authority boundaries””." In his speech, the noble Lord modified it a bit further than his amendment seems to go but the basic principle behind it is extremely important, except that where there are large, sprawling counties in two-tier areas those counties are clearly far too big to be the areas of the commissioning groups. In a county such as my own, Lancashire, or North Yorkshire it would seem sensible for the clinical commissioning groups to be smaller than the county, although I would argue strongly that the county boundaries and the top-tier or the unitary authority boundaries should not be crossed.