Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment 4. It is a pleasant change to be moving the first amendment in Committee instead of being last up at 10 pm, as I have been on several recent occasions. However, I can be as brief in moving this amendment as one is obliged to be at 10 pm. At Second Reading, the noble Baroness asked me to work with the Government to make the Bill and its guidance stronger and more effective. It is in that spirit that I move this amendment today. The amendment would make it a legal requirement for service providers to involve users of those services in decisions on how they will discharge their functions under the regulations. Apart from this being good practice as a matter of course, there is a particular reason for making this a legal requirement in the Bill. Two recently introduced statutory instruments—2655 and 2678—made two very welcome changes to benefit rules applying to service users who are paid for their involvement in the work of a variety of bodies in the health and social care field. One concerned the treatment of reimbursed expenses as earnings and the other the application of what are known as "notional earnings". However, the new rules cover only those whose involvement is required by law. Those whose involvement is merely a matter of good practice or a response to policy guidance are not covered. The new rules do not apply unless the involvement of service users is required by statute or is commissioned by a public body that is required by law to involve service users. I am moving this amendment to make absolutely sure that service users who are involved in decisions about how the new regulations are implemented will be covered and able to derive the benefit of the new benefit rules. I beg to move.