Health and Social Care Bill (Programme) (No. 4)

Well, as Aneurin Bevan said, ““You give your version of the truth, and I will give mine.”” In my assessment, yes, there will certainly be a mandate, but this House's power to scrutinise and hold Ministers to account will be severely diminished under the new arrangements. Writing down that the Secretary of State has the duty"““to exercise functions to secure the provision of services””" is thus rather perverse—one might even say ridiculous—when the rest of the Bill hands over those duties to other bodies, often private bodies outside the NHS such as the clinical commissioning groups. Indeed, the National Commissioning Board—the world's biggest quango—will also secure provision through clinical commissioning groups, which will not be done through the Secretary of State. [Interruption.] I think the Minister is being extremely disrespectful, Madam Deputy Speaker, in the way he is gesticulating when I am trying to make my points. In effect, the Secretary of State's only duty seems to be to pass over the money or the resource and write one letter a year—this mandate—to the National Commissioning Board. On the issue of the duty to promote a comprehensive health service and secure the provision of services as opposed to any duty to promote autonomy, this surely remains a conundrum, as they are virtually mutually exclusive. How the Secretary of State thought that those two competing principles could sit side by side or that he could balance the two is beyond me. This is the problem with the Bill as a whole. No matter how much tweaking is done to clauses 2, 4 or 20 by these amendments, we cannot escape this dilemma. That brings me back to my key point that this Bill's driving ideological purpose remains to commercialise and privatise each and every service in the NHS. Finally, let me return to the definition of autonomy—[Interruption.]—for the information of Conservative Members, who are shouting across the Chamber. According to the dictionary, autonomy means"““the condition of being autonomous; self-government or the right of self-government; independence””." What we are talking about here is being autonomous or independent of the Secretary of State. My contention is that only central planning can deliver a comprehensive service. Otherwise, we will have postcode lotteries—identified in the risk registers we have discussed, such as the one from the Faculty of Public Health—and unprofitable services being cut back. Once the private sector is too big to control, what then?