NHS Reorganisation

I am conscious of the need to get to the end of my remarks to allow more Members to speak. If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I will not take too many interventions. The Cheshire GPs fear that there will be a levelling down of services and cuts to front-line patient services if there is a merger with the debt-ridden Cheshire West and Ellesmere Port and Neston PCTs. As has been outlined, good PCTs such as Central Cheshire are now to be penalised to prop up disastrously underperforming ones such as Cheshire West, which has KPMG in. The Government are 100 per cent. responsible for that muddle, as well as for the deficits resulting from rising cost pressures and the cost of meeting Government targets. Why are the Government charging ahead with all that? It is neither for NHS patients nor those who work in the NHS, but that is what the Minister will no doubt claim when she responds. One only needs to witness the collapse in morale among NHS clinical and non-clinical staff to know that the Government are in serious denial. Can anyone doubt that the Government are conducting a sham consultation on all these changes? Can it be in doubt that the Government will not break the habits of a lifetime, have no intention of respecting the consultation processes and certainly not the responses, and will press on with their proposals regardless of the responses received? We need look no further than yesterday’s announcement on the police for proof of that. The proposed merger of strategic health authorities into remote bodies aligned with Government offices for the regions is, despite all the Government’s ever more wild and shrill protestations, yet another manifestation of their addictive personality—their obsession with regionalisation, even though SHAs have patently failed in their key task of performance managing NHS organisations. One does not get a £1 billion deficit if one has been a success.