---

Health and Social Care Bill [Ways and Means]

In speaking to this Ways and Means resolution, I am mindful of the words of my late, great colleague on the Conservative Benches and champion of the rights and duties of this House, the former Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, Mr. Eric Forth. He noted:"““It is always a great pity that these apparently innocuous Ways and Means resolutions attract such relatively little attention from colleagues in the House, because they are, of course, a very important part of what remains of the House's influence on the sort of measures that flow from legislation. I should like to think that in some ways Members would be more interested in Ways and Means resolutions than in many other aspects of the Bills themselves.””—[Official Report, 15 November 2004; Vol. 426, c. 1064.]" I pay tribute to the fact that the Conservative Members who sit on the Committee considering this Bill are present for this Ways and Means resolution debate; apart from the Minister, only the Parliamentary Private Secretary and the Whip are on the Government Benches. That is a shame. Furthermore, it is notable that the Minister chose not to answer the direct questions put to him, quite properly, by my hon. Friends the Members for Buckingham (John Bercow) and for Woking (Mr. Malins); my hon. Friend the Member for Woking brings expertise to this subject from his past. The Minister has just said that the House authorities deemed it necessary to bring this stand-alone, separate Ways and Means resolution to the Floor of the House today. I remind the House, however, that that would not have been necessary had the Government got their act together sufficiently in advance of publication and the commencement of the Bill's proceeding through the House. They should not have left outstanding a series of open-ended negotiations so that the resolution could not be recognised in the Bill when it was first published. According to House rules, when the Government table a new clause a Ways and Means resolution is necessary if the new clause would raise a new fee structure or a tax—and I shall argue that new clause 7 does. The Government are responsible for taking up the time of the House on this matter, which is important, given that we are already in Committee and considering the very issues to which it relates. This debate arises from Government new clause 7. The Committee has not yet debated or voted to amend the Bill through the new clause. It is therefore valid to ask whether we should take up the House's valuable time at this point of the Committee's proceedings.