Personal Care at Home Bill

I want to make a point that I hope will endure for the whole of our debate: it is a plea for clarity about terms. A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a senior member of a local authority social services department make a complete hash of explaining care brokerage to a roomful of people. She managed, in the course of five minutes and two sentences, to confuse care assessment, care brokerage, negotiation of services and funding. It is important that, in talking about an appeal, we recognise that there are three different appeal processes in social care. One is an appeal against an assessment of needs, the second may be an appeal against the basis on which that assessment was made—that is, the criteria—and the third is an appeal against the decision about what funds or, indeed, services to allocate to somebody. I assume that the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, wishes to do all three of those, but I want us to be very clear all the way through these discussions about precisely what we are talking about, because those three assessments need to be done entirely separately. The noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, will understand that, although it is interesting to follow where the money comes from, it is absolutely essential that the analysis of need be independent. Not only might the individual user wish to appeal against that, but crucially their carers might wish to do so, because of the way in which those assessments are commonly done. I reiterate: please could we have some clarity about terms throughout this debate? The 47 amendments that have been put down show that this afternoon is all about clarity and definition, which may be the only thing that we achieve at the end of our debate. Therefore, we should be very careful about the terms that we use.