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Health Bill [HL]

I do not wish to spend tremendous time on this group of amendments because to some extent the point has already been made. There was wide scepticism about the nature of the pilots in social care and the extent to which they genuinely reflected the concerns of different client groups within social care. Scepticism also arose from the department’s response to the IBSEN review. If one were to read the press release that went with it, one would be tempted to see the pilots as having been an unqualified success. Yet when one studies the report in detail, there is a great deal in it that shows that there are issues that are yet to be fully and adequately addressed, and there are some differences that are capable of interpretation in different ways. My amendments are an attempt to say that when it comes to piloting individual budgets in healthcare, where there is not only a far greater number of client groups but also different categories of patients, there is a need to make sure that we have different demographic and geographic pilots that encompass all those differences. I beg to move.