Health and Social Care Bill

I am grateful to my noble friend and I did mean to make specific reference to his speech, which I found very impressive. He is of course absolutely right. There is no doubt that the commissioning of specialised services in recent years has improved in many areas but it is still variable. I do not believe I am misrepresenting those who champion the cause of patients with rare conditions by saying that they welcome the fact that the commissioning of specialised care will now fall to the NHS Commissioning Board. In other words, the commissioning will be done once and not, as at the moment, very frequently 10 times at strategic health authority level. It is absolutely clear that for all sorts of reasons greater consistency and better quality need to be injected into the commissioning of specialised care. The points my noble friend made were ones that we certainly subscribe to.