Welfare Reform Bill

The noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, is considerably braver than I would dare to be when referring to her noble friend. The Minister will not be surprised to find these amendments, because he will have seen them debated before in an unmodified form in another place. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, has very sensibly taken the Commons Minister’s responses to that debate and incorporated them in her amendment, which I am very pleased to support. The drafting of Clauses 31 and 32 more closely resembles the right to request direct payments and does not provide for self-directed support. Clause 33(2)(a) states that the relevant authority will carry out an assessment of the disabled person’s need, which suggests that it will follow the old model, where professionals dictate to disabled people rather than the self-directed support model, which involves a supported self-assessment, empowering the disabled person to say what their own needs are. The White Paper said that the intention of the legal right to control is to reflect the fact that a disabled individual is the expert in his or her life. That simply must be the case. The Government will have to make clear their intentions. It is not enough, and will certainly not fob off noble Lords in this Committee—still less those people outside who are waiting for government promises to be delivered—for the Government to continue spouting rhetoric about guaranteeing individual choice and trusting people to judge what is in their own best interests and act accordingly, and other fine intentions, while waiting, for example, for a Law Commission report, which may or may not turn up in 2011, and while pushing forward legislation that falls far short of those ideals in practice. The amendment is barely a paper’s thickness from the stated positions on direct control of all parties. I hope that the Minister will look again at the provisions that we are debating and conclude that the Bill does not quite deliver what the Government suggested that it would. What we thought we would see following the White Paper, and what I and, I think, other noble Lords would like to see now that the reality of the Bill is presented to us, is for it to be quite clear that the disabled person is placed right in the centre of the arrangements affecting his or her life, and that the state will fall in with that rather than vice versa. I suppose that the amendment is asking for the Government to square a rather difficult circle. It is only the Government who can achieve that.