Health Bill [HL]

I thank the Minister for that reply. The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, is very timely and well meant. I say that for a particular reason. There are different forms of evaluation of direct payments and individual budgets. The IBSEN review is clearly the biggest, but there are others. According to the last edition of In Control’s newsletter on its website, 9,068 people had individual budgets for direct payments in social care. That is a huge increase on the year before. If one looks behind that headline figure, we begin to unravel some interesting points. Some 50 per cent of those involved are older people, but 50 per cent of the people in that group of just over 9,000 come from only three local authorities: Manchester, Oldham and Hartlepool. That is quite surprising given that it is currently a performance measure for local authorities that they should be trying to get people on to individual budgets. It is clear that not all local authorities are reporting back to In Control. More than that, we know for a fact that, until two weeks ago, one of those local authorities was refusing FOI requests to find out how many of the people they were funding were older people, people with learning disabilities or people with mental health problems on the grounds that it was a pilot. Therefore, those data are of limited value. We should be clear when we take the potentially significant step of rolling out individual budgets to health that the data on which we do that are sufficiently robust that criticisms cannot be levelled at the programme and it cannot be undermined. This will happen at a time when budgets will be under great pressure. The data have to be robust, and we cannot allow enthusiasm to run away with us. That is part of the reason for that proposal. I understand what the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was trying to do. He was right to point out some of the population differences. Having said that, over the past 20 years, there have been a number of pilots in different places—the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, mentioned some of them—but they do not quite capture all the issues. They do not, for example, capture some of the issues about which older people feel more intensely than younger people. Older people being supported and enabled to return to work is not as big an issue as it is for younger people. Yet loneliness is a very big issue for older people. That is why we must make sure that the population groups included in these pilots are as big and diverse as possible, so that the data are sufficiently robust. On the basis of the Minister’s assurances, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 61 withdrawn.