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Health and Social Care Bill

I was the Minister responsible for the MHRA and very much share the noble Baroness’s views on this. There are some slight differences, one of which is that a lot of the funding for the MHRA, in effect, comes from the pharmaceutical industry, in terms of licence fees. However, I was well aware of the MHRA experience, and my own experience of it, in trying to craft Amendment 257ZA, which does bear some resemblance to that. I certainly would not argue with the idea that the number of non-executives under my amendment should be larger than three—it does say ““at least three””. I will certainly go along with her that some outside expertise, in quite substantial numbers among the non-executives, is an extremely good model.