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Health and Social Care Bill

I will say a few words as the Minister who took the 2003 Act through, which had exactly the same wording as we are discussing here. I seem to recall—from memory, I have not checked Hansard—that I was chided then as being a sort of embryo dictator who was going to ensure that we micromanaged the commission. I think that if you ask the chairs and chief executives of the commissions, they will say that we have not micromanaged them. It is not a bad rule to see past behaviour as a predictor of future behaviour. If there are other parts of the Bill that noble Lords see as micromanagement, the right thing to do is to amend those parts of the Bill, not to delete this one, which qualifies what comes before it: the functions. I say gently to some colleagues opposite that if a democratically elected Government publish a manifesto and are elected on the basis that they will do certain things in relation to the service that is the highest consumer of public sector funding in the country, it is not an unreasonable proposition that the Secretary of State in office, whether a Conservative Secretary of State, a Labour Secretary of State or even—dare one contemplate it?—a Liberal Democrat Secretary of State, should be able to implement that manifesto commitment. I give the Committee some examples. I recommend to those who want to check them the Labour manifestos of 2001 and 2005, which dealt with choice and targets for improving cancer waiting lists and A&E departments. It is quite reasonable to require the regulator to take account of those obligations in the way in which it inspects. I am not being fanciful about this, because I think that the Bill can be improved; indeed, I have tabled amendments to do so. Parts of this Bill would not have been framed as they have if I had been the Minister responsible for them. But this subsection does not seem to me to be the right one to amend, because it merely carries forward provisions that have already been made under existing legislation passed by this Parliament.