Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 29, and I would like to thank the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for allowing me to pop in on his amendment group. This is a much better time for me, and I thank him. It is a privilege to have this opportunity to again raise the vital issue of social care portability. It is so fundamental to the basic human rights of disabled and older people. Many noble Lords will remember the very positive debate that we had when my amendment on portability was debated during the passage of the Health and Social Care Act. Strong cross-party support then led directly to the commitment in the recent social care Green Paper to work towards a national care system with portability at its heart. I promised noble Lords during that debate that I would give portability my forensic attention. I am therefore very glad that I am today able rather modestly to place an amendment to make that commitment a reality for 280,000 disabled and older people with the highest support needs who are anticipated to qualify for the new free care provision. The effect of my amendment would be to ensure that the new free personal care provision is portable between local authority areas. People who qualify for free personal care in one local authority area would be entitled to move to another, in the certainty that they would continue to receive that free care without anxiety, disruption or delay. The amendment achieves this by placing a duty on the receiving authority to pick up funding responsibility for a person’s free personal care for a transitional period without being required to carry out a further assessment. Authorities would also be required to take other steps to ensure that the person enjoys full continuity of support. It is vital that those with critical-plus needs receive seamless support if and when they move home to be near relatives. Delays as people wait for a new assessment could at worst be fatal and at best lead to grave health crises, putting disabled people and their families under enormous strain. The Government have pledged that the new free care offer will be underpinned by a common assessment framework that will help to iron out inconsistencies between authorities. Some say that this negates the need for a portability clause in the Bill. However, a common assessment framework will not guarantee that the transition from one authority to another will be seamless. A receiving authority will be required to reassess people who previously qualified for free personal care, even though their needs will not have changed. I will now hand over to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, to assist me. At this point, Baroness Wilkins continued the speech for Baroness Campbell of Surbiton. It is widely accepted that local authorities fail in their responsibilities to deliver seamless support to disabled people who move between authorities. Continuity of support is treated as an aspiration rather than as a necessity. Many people I know are too terrified to move for fear of their support falling apart. If they do move, they face huge stress and hardship as they struggle to renegotiate vital care and support. It is these fears and this hardship that my amendment seeks to address, albeit only for those with the highest level of need. A major inspiration for the amendment, apart from a desire to address the harrowing experiences that disabled and older people face when moving home, is of course the desire to see human rights standards brought to life. The UK Government recently ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which spells out that disabled people must be able to choose where we live on an equal basis with others, and that we have the right to work and participate in our communities and to be free from exploitation, violence and abuse. The amendment has strong support from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which states that, ""current arrangements place an unfair and inequitable restriction on freedom of movement and, at the very least, are very much against the spirit of the right to private and family life as set out in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights … the Commission supports enshrining portability within primary legislation. Any other approach would continue to restrict this fundamental human right"." At this point, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton resumed. I am pleased to report that there are now local authorities out there itching to implement portability. I recently had the pleasure of being on the interview panel for the Department for Work and Pensions’ Right to Control trailblazer sites. We were tasked with choosing eight local authorities to test the new Right to Control over one’s support services. I was delighted to see that some local authorities put in their consortium bids, with one or two neighbouring councils, a right to portability. They did this to streamline support services between local authority boundary lines. Some are now very keen to test portability where once they were not. I think that this enthusiasm for portability, which really was not there one or two years ago, and certainly was not in the criteria for the trailblazer bids, demonstrates the beginning of a local authority culture sea change. Let us capitalise on that now, for we do not want best practice confined to only a noble few. My amendment is short, sweet and to the point. In many ways, it is cost neutral—we are not asking for more funding. As time is short, I will just say two things on the detail. The first is that disabled people are very aware that the exact level of direct payments and type of services available will differ from one local authority to another. We are realistic about that. We understand continuity of support to be about creating a support package that meets our needs, rather than replicating identical services. Secondly, I want to emphasise that it will be particularly important to spell out in regulations and guidance the need for user and family involvement in all arrangements made to support someone in picking up their new life in a new place. If the Government accept the need for action today, it will send a strong message of hope to thousands of disabled and older people in England that they may move without fear of reprisals. It will also keep the costs of this Bill down by ensuring scarce resources are not wasted on reassessing people whose needs have not changed. We have a momentous opportunity to test this out and make a start on portability, and I urge noble Lords to grasp it. I beg to move.