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Independent Sector Treatment Centres

On the face of it, I would agree with the hon. Gentleman. Some clinicians were clearly drawing those conclusions without the evidence for them, and we were quite critical of that, because the evidence was not there. However, the simple answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question is that we asked other organisations, such as the General Medical Council, of which I am a lay member. When the GMC came before us as a witness, we asked whether anything in its fitness to practise proceedings showed that the independent sector was receiving more complaints about its professional attitude than the rest of the national health service. The simple answer was that there was nothing. We looked where we could to make that judgment, and the simple answer is that, no, we cannot make that allegation. We were trying to make sense of the allegations that were made to us that, again, could only have been anecdotal and which are still around. I have no doubt that, like me, the hon. Gentleman will have received letters this week from the British Orthopaedic Association, which is still looking round, hoping at some stage to prove the allegations to us, although we have still not seen any of the evidence that we asked it for in July 2006. We criticised the association, in as much as the allegations that were being made were unsubstantiated. My personal view is that those allegations should be substantiated or withdrawn.