Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I was not convinced by the noble Earl’s views on the number of clinical commissioning groups in our earlier debate. I was even less convinced by what he had to say about competencies. There was a lot of talk about, ““The board may wish to do this””, and, ““The board may wish to do that””, on competencies. The problem of healthcare commissioning in this country has actually been the lack of competency. That has been the problem for 10 to 20 years, under successive Governments. If we miss the boat again on this issue, we are making a great blunder. I do not want to go over the ground about consultation with the public at all. I am interested in having in the Bill that the critical requirement of becoming a clinical commissioning group is competency to do the job, and that the board is required to specify what those competencies are, before people make an application. My noble friend Lord Hunt has made the perfectly sensible observation that while we are sitting, chatting about this Bill, people out there are doing the business about who will be clinical commissioning groups. That is what is actually happening. We need to make sure that they are under no illusions that competency is the yardstick by which they will be judged. I am not satisfied with the Government’s response and wish to test the opinion of the House. Division on Amendment 159 Contents 46; Not-Contents 106. Amendment 159 disagreed. Amendments 159A to 169 not moved. Amendment 170 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List. Amendments 170A to 171A not moved. Amendments 172 and 173 Moved by