---

Health and Social Care Bill

I strongly support the case made by my noble friend, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege. I have added my name in support of this group of amendments, which all set out the relationship between the CQC and local involvement networks. As I said at Second Reading, I would expect the CQC to play a strong role in supporting the changes concerning user involvement and joint-needs assessment to be ushered in by the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act, and in monitoring the effectiveness of these new arrangements. This is about taking a joined-up approach. We should expect LINks to feed in their knowledge and experiences to CQC, so that it can act on the basis of the widest range of user views. We should expect some independent oversight of how well user involvement is working on the ground under the new arrangements so that problems can be picked up quickly and improvements made. At the moment, as has been clearly outlined, the relationship is undefined. I believe that we will do users of health and social care no favours by leaving it in this way.