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Health and Social Care Bill

I really do, which is why amendments Nos. 48 and 49 rightly raise this issue at this stage of our proceedings. The Government have sought to skate over what they know to be a patent embarrassment, and a patent inability to produce evidence, because they know that the evidence is not there to back up the Prime Minister's statement from the Dispatch Box to a full House that nutrition was most important in the ““last months of pregnancy””. The Prime Minister cannot undo those words or, as Hillary Clinton would say, ““unspeak”” them, as they are there on the record. It is difficult to have an explicit debate on a subject which was kicked off on the wrong basis by the absence of evidence for a prime ministerial opinion. We have not pinned down the function of the policy. On 6 December 2006, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, now the Prime Minister, said:"““I have received powerful representations””—" his normal code for trying to dismiss things that have not come out of his own head—"““that in the last months of pregnancy, when nutrition is most important””—" I am quoting him—"““and in the first weeks after birth, the extra costs borne by parents could be better recognised if we did more to help through our universal benefit—child benefit””—[Official Report, 6 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 308.]" The Treasury has repeatedly refused to make those ““powerful representations”” available; it has been asked, but repeatedly refuses to do so. I have asked, but I have had no response, despite a raft of parliamentary questions perfectly properly asking for the evidence that the Prime Minister has specifically and explicitly relied on. Both the Treasury and the Department of Health have failed to provide any evidence that nutrition is most important at those times. During the oral evidence sitting, as I am sure the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) will remember, the Minister admitted, in contradiction to what the Prime Minister said, that the evidence suggested that the nutritional benefits specifically to the unborn child were more important earlier in the pregnancy. We agree with the Minister about that.