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Health and Social Care Bill

I add my support to the amendments. I was once upon a time on a community health council, when I was a young mother with little children, and I worked extraordinarily hard. It is never too late even in this debate to pay tribute to those people who worked on the community health councils; they worked hard and made a tremendous contribution to the health service. As a health service manager later on, I remember being driven mad by our local community health council, which was a very good thing indeed. It would not get off our backs if it was dissatisfied with something that was going on in the area. I was very sad to see the demise of the community health councils, although I was not in any sort of health brief at the time. Likewise the patient forums, which had barely got going; they were only just grouped and knew what they were doing. We have heard today that there are no LINks ye, because no host bodies have been found—that makes LINks sound a bit like tapeworms or liver flukes. What a dreadful phrase! Contrast that with what we were discussing earlier; the advertisement for and appointment of a shadow director of the Care Quality Commission, which rather pushes the users of the health service down the ladder a little bit and says that they are not nearly as important as some of us think they are. We should support the amendments, and I hope that the Government will take them on board and look at this carefully. It is an ideal and logical way of connecting the Care Quality Commission, if it ever comes into existence over my dead body—I am sure it will come into existence—and engaging with the users of the services.