Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

Interesting matters have been raised. Given the time, it is not appropriate to have the full-scale debate that I should like. However, I make a couple of comments. I absolutely take the point about the implication of all this—that local authorities would be left with next to no discretion. I was rather saddened that the approach seems to be a different centralised approach, not individually local as I should have liked. To say that it ducks the issue of how tax should be raised is too harsh, because it has not attempted to deal with that. It is interesting to see where the demarcation should be between analysing the costs and some of the other things laid out under ““functions”” and the debate about how money should be raised. My next comment is not intended to be picky but truly to inquire. The ““financial provisions”” paragraph refers to the ““total council tax precepted””. Is the word ““precepted”” intentional or should the phrase read ““total council tax raised””? I believe that ““precepted”” has a particular meaning in this context. I hope that we get an opportunity to discuss all this when we are not under such time pressure.