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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her detailed reply and particularly grateful that she has agreed to take the amendment relating to governance away with her for further consideration. I just add to what I said—I am sure that she appreciates this—that my amendment does not seek to be prescriptive about particular governance systems. All it does is try to ensure that some form of governance arrangement exists within a LINk. To that extent it is prescriptive, but its prescriptiveness is fairly mild. I am grateful for the reassurance that the Minister gave on collaboration, which I can only accept. It is good to know that there is no question of LINks acting ultra vires if they choose to engage in activities that are regional or national in their scope. I was disappointed with the Minister’s reply about the conflict of interest question. To imagine an NHS body as a host is to imagine something undesirable and inappropriate. Indeed, those were the words the Minister used to describe that situation. Yet she also said that the Bill was deliberately permissive. I find that very strange. But even if we are able to live in hope that such a situation will not arise, I have a nagging worry that under the rules of statutory construction the explicit exclusion of NHS bodies from LINks would suggest their implicit acceptability as hosts. I can only suggest that the debate we have just had is flagged up in some appropriate way to deter anyone from even supposing that an NHS body might prove an acceptable host. The Government are being rather precious about this issue in not countenancing the matter being sorted out on the face of the Bill. As regards dispute resolution, again I was sorry that the Minister did not warm to the proposal that I put forward. I simply ask: who out there will be capable of advising Government how well the LINks system is working nationally? It surely cannot be the LINks themselves nor, realistically, can it be local authorities. The role of a monitor would not simply be a tier of bureaucracy, as the Minister put it, but a function that Government and LINks would find invaluable. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the Minister for having considered the issue. We may reserve the right to revisit the amendment at Third Reading, but—