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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I think I am the last Member of the Committee to speak on the amendments in this group and I promise I will be brief. I have two amendments in this group. One concerns a public health specialist on the clinical commissioning groups. We have been around the houses with this and my noble friend Lady Williams has spoken most eloquently on this matter so I will not emphasise the points again. My second amendment is to do with the recruitment and remuneration of lay members of clinical commissioning groups. The Committee has rehearsed the arguments that there is a lot of silence around clinical commissioning groups and their governance. This just underpins that. There is a bit of a Catch-22 with this situation because the Bill makes provision for an audit committee and a remuneration committee and also for a lay member to chair each of the two groups. Therefore, you could argue that a remuneration committee might play a part in deciding how much a lay person would be remunerated by for sitting on the group. However, we do not yet have the lay person to chair the group and take the decision, so who will take the first decision about the appointment of these two lay members? They will also need remuneration; who will take that decision? The other big issue that has been discussed by the Committee this evening is that of transparency within the governance of clinical commissioning groups. I expect the noble Earl hopes to wind up soon. When he does, I hope he will be able to give us a steer on the Government’s thinking on this.