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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I seek clarification because the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, has just referred to a whole series of different emergencies. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, referred earlier to Clause 43 and the question of emergencies. I am confused about what we mean by emergencies and, under the emergency powers, the relevant types of emergency that we are dealing with. Clause 43 states that, "““‘a relevant emergency’, in relation to the Board or a clinical commissioning group, means any emergency which might affect the Board or the group””." We then talk about the emergencies that might occur when there is a national disaster. I take noble Lords’ minds back to the bombings on 7/7 in 2005. That was a major national emergency that was managed by COBRA—an organisation that involves the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and the Chief Medical Officer. All of them would be involved in that situation. We also referred to the E. coli epidemic earlier on and I take noble Lords back to the Asian flu and swine flu epidemics. The person who fronted that was not the Secretary of State but the Chief Medical Officer. He was the face of that particular epidemic. I think we need some clarification of what we mean by emergencies, because I, for one, am somewhat confused.