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Are the days of the General Social Care Council numbered? Its name pops up on a list of 42 so-called "arm’s length" bodies facing the chop as part of a Department of Health cost-cutting drive. If the list is halved it will save around half a billion pounds - a sum not to be sneezed at.

But we urge health secretary John Reid to wield his axe elsewhere. And we challenge any suggestion that the functions of the GSCC could be merged under an expanded Health Professions Council.

Social care staff have a role and an ethos not shared by the lab technicians, radiographers and chiropodists currently registered with the HPC. And surely the social care workforce - some 1.2 million people strong - merits a regulator of its own?

Health minister Stephen Ladyman told the audience at Community Care LIVE that "professional boundaries might be important to you, but they are not to service users." Fair point, but there’s a danger that if all staff are lumped in together as part of some amorphous mass, professional identity will be lost.

Let’s give the GSCC a chance to show it can do its job... to promote standards and protect the public. Scrapping it now would be crazy.