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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I apologise for intervening a second time. I want to link with things I raised the first time, because I have been left in some confusion by the noble Baroness, Lady Wall—which is not her fault—about what has been happening in London. My understanding is that at the beginning of the year the department issued a document suggesting four possible ways of doing clustering. One was along the lines that the noble Baroness spoke about. I forget what all four were, but one was that PCTs should informally group in clusters, create an informal board, and have one of the chairs, perhaps a rotating chair in some cases, who would oversee the informal cluster board. The legally existing boards would continue. At the back end of September, the department, at least as interpreted in the east of England, issued an edict saying that there were no longer four options. There was to be one, and it would be clustering, based on appointing the same people to more than one PCT board. That raises a number of issues, as my noble friend Lord Mawhinney has indicated with unmistakeable clarity, to which he and possibly I might wish to return later. Meanwhile, how many legally separate PCT boards exist at the moment, who is on them, and were different policies pursued by the department in different parts of the country? What the noble Baroness—my noble friend—Lady Wall said suggested that a different policy had been pursued in London—not for the first time, I may say—than was being pursued in the east of England at least, and possibly everywhere else. We need some clarity, not just on what the future is going to be, but what the present is.