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Health and Social Care Bill

Ministers might be forgiven for starting to think that there was an umbilical cord running around every person in this Room, save for the Front Bench. To demonstrate that that is not true, I do not support the amendment and do not think that the Government should accept it. They will really stuff me if they announce when they reply that that they are accepting it, but I will take that risk. When I first saw the amendment, I thought, ““Typical Liberal Democrats””—and then I saw that the noble Earl, Lord Howe, with whom I strongly agree on 99 per cent of matters, had put his name to it. My concern is not about the idea that sustainable development is important, because of course it is. My concern is with the growing tendency in the modern world to elevate secondary objectives of organisations to the level of primary objectives, including by writing them into Bills. That is a terrible danger, often seen in the multiplication of targets for organisations. If you give an organisation one, two or three objectives, it can hope to fulfil them and be accountable for them. If you give it 20, 30 or 40, the task becomes unmanageable and the organisation may be diverted from its central tasks. Occam taught us, "““entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem””—" forgive my French—which means, ““Do not multiply beings without the necessity of doing so””. The same is true of objectives for regulators on the face of legislation.