The news came shortly after plans to scrap the HSSIB were also dropped from the legislation.

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Sarah Woolnough, chief executive at The King's Fund welcomed the decision, commenting: ‘Healthwatch's important role in ensuring patient voices remain rooted in the community will also need to be connected to the new Director of Patient Experience role in the Department of Health and Social Care, to bring health and social care learning together and strengthen accountability for how organisations respond to feedback.'

Cllr Dr Wendy Taylor, chair of the LGA's Health and Wellbeing Committee, said: ‘Local patient and public voice are essential to the delivery of health and care services. Without independent, locally rooted voice to challenge and represent communities, there would have been a significant risk of health and care services marking their own homework.'

Hugh Alderwick, director of policy and research at The Health Foundation, said the decision would ‘avoid yet more unnecessary disruption in the NHS and means patients retain an independent voice to influence how the health system works'.

Alderwick added: ‘The NHS has a mixed record of listening to patients – so it's right that Government is also using the Bill to strengthen its own arrangements to hear and act on patients' views.'

Nuffield Trust chief executive Thea Stein said: ‘Abolishing Healthwatch would have thrown away the independence that gave it credibility, without doing anything to address the reasons the NHS often don't listen.

‘It was the wrong solution to a real problem. Healthwatch has played a valuable role in making it more difficult for the NHS to ignore patients' often frustrating experience of using it.

‘This retreat needs to be followed by a cultural shift away from a health service where patients' voices are all too often at the bottom of a long and impossible list.'