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Primary Care Trusts and Ambulance Trusts

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. Competing demands must be balanced in reaching the right judgment. Those demands are local focus, responsiveness to local need, a commissioner who has the weight and the power to drive a good bargain and get good commissioning for local people, and together with all those things, coterminosity with social service providers so that we can get joined services at local level. Some of those pressures are pulling in opposite directions and it is difficult to get them into balance. That is why we have no blueprint specifying that a PCT must be a particular size and shape in a particular locality. We have sought to do the best we can to manage the competing priorities. I am pleased to say that in the hon. Gentleman’s area there was strong support for a Hampshire PCT coterminous with the local authority boundaries.