Personal Care at Home Bill

I understand and accept the validity of the points that have just been made. One of the lacunae in the Bill is the uncertainty about the relationship between care in residential contexts and care at home. For example, what happens if someone comes from a care-at-home situation and needs care in a residence, which could well happen part-way down the system? So there are lacunae in the Bill, but I would like to detach those from the question of whether there ought to be and sensibly should be an appeals system of some kind. I can think of two practical grounds for having an appeals system. One is that evidence has shown in the past that appeals will come in anyway. Indeed, two or three years ago they came in in their thousands to the health ombudsman’s office. That office was not set up specifically to deal with this need, but appeals will go somewhere and, in that sense, it would be far better to have an appeals system that was understood within the context of the Bill. The other point is that it would be a considerable discipline, for those who agree what criteria should be applied, to have those criteria plain and understood and with as much objectivity as possible in such a difficult situation. That being the case, there would be fairly straightforward grounds, I would hope, for settling whether a particular appeal should be upheld. There are cases to be made for supporting an appeals system, despite the continuing problems of the Bill.