Health and Social Care Bill

That might have been the case, but I recall that under the Government of which he was a member, a fair amount of Henry VIII powers went through at the same time so, although his basic thesis might be different, I am not sure that Parliament was that much more able to question the intention of the Secretary of State at the point at which primary legislation was being debated in this House. I want to speak up partly in support of the amendment moved so eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessey. I would perhaps differ slightly. I think that in this House there is a great deal of very high quality scrutiny of delegated powers and secondary legislation. It is one of the things that this House does extremely well. The additional point in the proposal he has made is to bring to the process of scrutiny of secondary legislation the involvement of people on the Health Select Committee in the House of Commons who, by dint of their membership of that committee, have a detailed and ongoing knowledge of the workings of the National Health Service in its entirety. I understand what he is trying to do, and I have a great deal of sympathy with it. My only reservation about that is that I think the power of the Health Select Committee is that it sets its own agenda and holds the Government to account. I would not like an inadvertent effect of what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessey, is proposing to be to trammel the independence and power of that very important committee to scrutinise what the Government are doing. However having made that criticism, I have a great deal of sympathy with what he is trying to do, but I hesitantly suggest that perhaps this problem is not quite as new as some noble Lords might suggest.