Andrew George

It is an enormous pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Alex McIntyre)—I call him my hon. Friend as he is a fellow member of the Health Committee. The 2012 Act was mentioned earlier, and I am one of the few Members who was in this House when it was passed. I was sitting on the coalition Benches at the time, but I eventually voted against the Second Reading and the Third Reading of the Bill because it broke the coalition agreement. We had agreed that there would be no top-down reorganisation, but it was the biggest reorganisation that the NHS had ever seen. Although the Liberal Democrats made the Bill significantly less bad—and I congratulate all those involved in that—there was still far too much that damaged the NHS. I welcome this Bill as it addresses some of those deficiencies. On the points made by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), I strongly agree about the abolition or the merging of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body into the CQC.