My Lords, I will intervene from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench on this one. I could see the alarm in the Minister’s eyes that a Westminster health and care spokesperson might try to intervene on an order to do with Northern Ireland health and care. I assure him that it is as technical as his contribution at the beginning. We have no problem at all with the statutory instrument in front of us today.
I want to make one point, which I hope the Minister will take back. The noble Lord, Lord Murphy, may be aware that the Health and Care Act is the first real attempt by a Government in this country to combine health and social care, so Westminster, on behalf of England, is finally getting its act together and combining the two—which, whatever opposition we had to elements of it, we certainly welcomed. In March, during its passage through your Lordships’ House, a number of amendments were ruled out of order because they referred to some of the UK-wide legislation that the
Minister referred to in his opening. We were told that an agreement had been struck by the Government with all three devolved nations, which had already taken their legislation through, and therefore that amendments we wished to lay could not be laid.
They were very minor and technical, so I will not go into them here. However, if we are going to talk about the importance of devolved responsibilities and try to mend some of the complex technical issues around legislation that crosses into UK-wide legislation, those working on Bills, certainly in your Lordships’ House, need to know at a much earlier stage where those discussions need to be had. It would have helped the transition of the Health and Care Bill, which was enacted on 28 April—some two months after the Act we are discussing was enacted—because there were things we would have liked to change and would have raised much earlier, had we been aware that there were issues.