Health and Social Care Bill

Would the noble Baroness give way? She has raised an interesting point. Could I describe the situation in Birmingham? My understanding is that although there will be more than one clinical commissioning group, there will clearly be one HWWB group and the membership has now reached 25. There is one place for providers on it. One gets the feeling that there is a risk that it will become a talking shop. Secondly—and I declare my interest as chair of an NHS foundation trust in Birmingham—if you excludes the providers from those key discussions, you will not get a buy-in. Think of patient discharge and the relationship between reducing length of stay, preventing admissions and the support that social services needs to give packages of care. One worries that you reach a situation where the whole thing is so unwieldy that it will not really work.