Health and Social Care Bill

I support the amendment. The significance of the chief environmental health officer’s role would stem from his or her being the national head of the profession. The enormous amount of work that local chief environmental health officers do will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in local government. Their work stretches from food standards in local restaurants right through to housing conditions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said. It is important that there is a clear mechanism by which the issues that are being highlighted and the points that need to be followed through by government action are fed up to the national level of government. If the Government resist this amendment, I would be interested to hear precisely what mechanisms they see as being available to local environmental health officers and local health and well-being boards to pass through the sorts of issues that can be tackled only at national level.