Schedule 1 - Constitution of public benefit corporations

Part of Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:30 pm on 13 May 2003.

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Photo of Andrew Lansley Andrew Lansley Conservative, South Cambridgeshire 3:30, 13 May 2003

I see a parallel but, if we go down the route of argument by analogy, we will get into difficult territory. Are we talking about a locally accountable public service, or a company that is engaged in a purely commercial enterprise? Those distinctions make the analogy difficult to draw. What do we mean by local accountability? What are we setting out to do? Are we creating a mutual organisation of consumers

and a mutual organisation of producers, or are we creating something that has distinct and unique characteristics that include direct local control? How relevant is local control to specialist tertiary hospitals that provide services on a regional and supra-regional basis?

My local hospital, Papworth, provides a supra-regional service, but regards itself as being rooted in the community. That may be for very specific reasons. The whole village of Papworth Everard was created as a TB colony. It is a place where relatively large numbers of people with disabilities live; a place where the Varrier-Jones foundation and the Papworth trust provide specialist services to people with disabilities. All those relationships are complicated, and have an historical background. If we were to exclude the possibility that the constituency of a specialist hospital would include people in its local geographical community, I would regard that as misplaced with regard to the Papworth hospital trust.

There are other specialist hospitals; my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) referred to the Brompton earlier. The Brompton may conclude that there should be no place for a geographical basis of representation. I do not know; it is up to that institution to decide. In my view, the specialist tertiary centre at Papworth does have a geographical basis for representation as well as a wider public constituency.

From my point of view that was quite a useful and interesting digression, but I persist with my reservations about amendment No. 125. I have delayed the Committee longer than I intended, but I hope that Ministers and hon. Members will see merit in amendments Nos. 118 and 119 when we come to the relevant point in the consideration of the Bill.