Health and Social Care Bill

I have been cogitating what the Minister has been saying, in his normal, plausible way, about the consultation with everybody before the mandate is agreed by the Secretary of State. The trouble that I have with that, worthy though it is, is that it does not really deal with the point in my Amendment 98, and in some ways it makes the situation worse. My amendment is all about how the national Commissioning Board answers back and tells Parliament if it thinks that the final mandate is undeliverable. That is the purpose. If you have extensive public consultation, the point that my noble friend Lord Harris made earlier comes into play. I am sorry to have got a bit fixated about the figure of 35, but you end up with 35 propositions in the mandate, and the money available to the Secretary of State at that point is still the same as when he went out to public consultation. We run an even greater risk of having a very overloaded mandate, with lots of items in it which come out of the public consultation. The money has not changed. The board is expected to deliver a larger number of things with the same amount of money. That is why my Amendment 98 becomes even more important if the Minister is going down the path that he says that the Government are going down.