Primary Care Trusts

The hon. Gentleman highlights one of the many inconsistencies in the Government’s whole approach to health policy. On the one hand, he says that we will have practice-based commissioning— if we believe that—and on the other, we have ““Commissioning a patient-led NHS””, which was all about PCTs commissioning, not providing. Practices are to commission, but PCTs are to commission, too, and individual patients are going to make individual choices that somebody is going to have to provide for, so in fact patients will determine the pattern of demand. Those three things cannot all be true at the same time. I have no idea—nor do the Government, I think—where we are going with that.