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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, that was a helpful and largely reassuring reply. I accept that the insertion in the Bill of provisions relating to strategic health authorities makes a difference in so far as wholesale changes to services are concerned, because they would necessarily have to be dealt with at that level. Nevertheless, I still have an uneasy feeling. I always come back in my mind to health inequalities and marginalised groups in a community, whose voice is less often heard than that of others. To argue that it is all right to switch a service to a different provider because the patient will not notice any difference misses the point that there could be people whom the service is not reaching at all, and that the provider concerned is not the best or most appropriate person to reach them. That concern lay behind my amendment.