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Health and Social Care Services

My hon. Friend makes an important point. When we set out the criteria for PCTs that were looking at new boundaries, we said that they needed to satisfy themselves and us that they would be able both to have effective commissioning of acute hospital services and to maintain the focus on local communities, especially the most disadvantaged. Where there is general public support for a proposal to merge several primary care trusts into a much larger area, one of the issues we will consider is how we may sustain that local focus and, in particular, how we may ensure that funding continues to go to the areas that need it most.