Of course I accept that if we have more money, we can do more, but I do not think that that exempts us, particularly given the public finances we inherited in 2010, from the obligation to look and see how we can get more for the £125 billion of taxpayers’ money that is already committed to health and social care in England.
That brings me to clause 3. If we are to deliver person-centred care and if we are to deliver early intervention to prevent avoidable cases, the only way to do so is to reinvent care on a much more integrated model between the national health service and the social care authorities. That is why there is the obligation in clause 3 to consider integrating health and care. In that way we will not think of the NHS as one bureaucracy and social care as another, but instead think of it, as Mike Farrar said when he was at the NHS Confederation, as a care system that provides medical support when
necessary, rather than as a medical system that provides care support when it has got the money—that is how not to do it.