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Health and Social Care Bill

The right hon. Gentleman knows that there is room for more than one view about the extent to which there is a need to rewrite the full statutory basis of the Bill, but that is not the issue now. The question is how, if we went down his route, had a summit and talked for another 12 months about what the institutional structure of the health service should be, that would serve the policy objective that he seeks to espouse, of greater clinical engagement in commissioning. How would it serve the policy objective of which he says he is in favour, of engaging local authorities and the wider political community in decisions that shape the future of the health service? One issue that the right hon. Gentleman did not mention in his speech is the shift of public health out of the relatively narrow interpretation that is implicit when it is located in the national health service. Instead, public health can properly be understood as being part of the wider range of local government. Those changes do not justify some of the more ambitious rhetoric being used in support of the Bill but they certainly do not come close justifying the rhetoric being used against it. If half the things being said about the Bill by Opposition Members were true, I and most of my right hon. and hon. Friends, and certainly my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, would not support it.