Before the Minister responds to that, perhaps I may add to it. I read from her statement on Monday evening, where she makes it absolutely clear that, under Amendment 28, we would be conferring on the combined authority many of the duties, such as,
“the duty to seek continuous improvement in the quality of services, reduce health inequalities, promote the NHS constitution”,
and to,
“seek to achieve the objectives in the NHS mandate”.—[Official Report, 13/7/15; col. 439.]
As I understand it, what she is saying openly and transparently is that those duties get transferred to the combined authority through the order. If someone then says to the Secretary of State, “I don’t like the way health inequalities are going on in Cornwall”, or wherever, presumably, the Secretary of State can say, “Tough. I passed an order through Parliament which enabled me to offload that duty to this group of people for a period of time”.
Is the Minister saying that she did not mean what she said on Monday, or have we got this wrong?