I have listened with quiet astonishment as Opposition Members have suggested that the NHS previously offered meaningful accountability and public control.
In the manner in which the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) spoke to amendment 30, he viciously punched a raw and delicate bruise in Wycombe. As I indicated in my intervention, it was under the last Government that we lost A and E services, maternity services and paediatrics. Years later, all that people want is to have those services back. They want an emergency unit that is capable of accepting whoever turns up. To use the jargon, they want the treatment of undifferentiated emergency patients. The NHS should not be offering constant excuses for why that cannot be provided. God knows, we pay enough in tax and in salaries that people ought to be creative enough to figure out how to offer the treatment of undifferentiated emergency patients at local hospitals like the one in Wycombe. There is a proposal to do so, which I will return to another day,
I have found myself listening to some sort of exposition of a democratic utopia that has never existed. When considering how this has been positioned—the idea that it is about reconfiguration rather than urgent procedures when a trust is in extreme difficulty—will the Minister reassure me that the Government did not establish clinical commissioning groups and health and wellbeing boards, and the rest, just so that they could use this clause and power to override everything else they have put in place?