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Family Doctor Services

The hon. Gentleman makes another good point. I want to say more about the concept of the health centre, or polyclinic. It seems to me that such schemes should be piloted to establish how they work in given settings, so that the lessons can be learned. I think that there is something in the concept for certain communities. Last summer I visited the Arches centre, in a very disadvantaged part of Belfast. People in the Province have the benefit of health and social care trusts, which the Liberal Democrats support. That health centre combines various services. It brings together health and social care, and makes available to the community services that would normally be in a more remote acute hospital. That is a very attractive model. Surely we should let these centres develop and grow, and then analyse their successes and, in some cases, their failures empirically before rolling them out across the country. What I find both extraordinary and frustrating is that, without such empirical evidence-gathering, the system is being imposed throughout the country on a ludicrously tight time scale. The Government should be condemned for that.