IMMEDIATELY after the Police consultation came the Strategic Health Authority s (SHA) decision on the future of SHAs, ambulance trusts and primary care trusts (PCT) in the area. To nobody s great surprise, they elected for a single PCT to cover the who

IMMEDIATELY after the Police "consultation" came the Strategic Health Authority's (SHA) decision on the future of SHAs, ambulance trusts and primary care trusts (PCT) in the area.

To nobody's great surprise, they elected for a single PCT to cover the whole of Cambridgeshire and the Peterborough unitary uthority area.

The "consultation" that led to this result must have had a lot of inputs that I somehow missed. For the county council came down firmly in favour of separate PCTs for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough; so did the Peterborough unitary authority and the board of the Peterborough PCT.

The board of the Huntingdonshire PCT, and the district council, and a considerable proportion of the local population, had even demanded that Huntingdonshire should remain a PCT in its own right.

I could not go that far but there is no way that this could be presented as a split vote. The county council voted against the Hunts PCT before holding a separate vote to choose between one and two PCTs for the old Cambridgeshire.

Again, the result rather smacked of "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up.