My Lords, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, I ask the Minister to consider the point that I was trying to make about Amendment 183. The Minister and the Government have got this the wrong way round: if he is actually
concerned about levels of efficiency, the supply of services and the issue of scale—and the issue of scale is a very real one—then he needs to be at the front of the process, not the end of it. It is a bit late in the day to be having these ideas about scale in a particular set of services when you have gone through the agony of the local consideration of reconfigurations. As a Minister, it would be better, if I may say so, to set out your views at the beginning with the clinical arguments for why this makes sense. Doing it at the end is bound to lead to suspicions. That is why I was asking the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, to look at the wording of Amendment 183. I say to the Minister that he is putting his involvement at the wrong part of the process.