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Health and Social Care Bill

I added my name to this amendment. The Government should have no difficulty at all in accepting it on two clear counts. One is that the world has changed significantly since the Bill was first published. We now have the declaration by the Government that social care will stream up the agenda, that there will be a number of reviews and that the difficult questions that we have all asked several times—including the Wanless review—will be asked again with, I hope, some outcome this time. The commission’s carrying out this function will be extremely helpful. Secondly, when the commission was first proposed, it was said that this kind of work would not be done at the beginning because it would be settling down. We have now accepted that it will settle down rather faster than was originally thought. Let us hope that that is so and that the commission can get on with this work. I am more familiar with the Commission for Social Care Inspection than with the Healthcare Commission but they both hold extraordinarily valuable information across the health and care sectors and it would be a huge pity if they did not get on and use that. There is now experience about working together. They have produced their document about duplication which outlined the type of work that they were doing together and we all know of the various reports that have been produced jointly. As I said, I cannot see why the Government would have any problem at all in accepting this amendment.