Barnet Community Health Council has worked to improve health services in the borough for 26 years.

It has often been the only voice speaking up for the patient against authorities obsessed by cost-cutting.

Now it is facing the axe. Under government plans to bring the NHS kicking and screaming into the 21st century it is replacing CHCs with council-based scrutiny bodies, teams of inspectors and in-hospital patient advocates.

This will take away the independence of a vital source of public feedback on the NHS and its workings.

The new body will be seen only as another layer of management or distant local authority bureaucracy ,, far removed from the average patient left waiting on a trolley.

CHCs fought with some success to make things better for patients. So why is it losing its independence?