Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Howe. In doing so, I confess to a certain amount of confusion in my mind. There is a possibility of conflict here between, on the one hand, the need for local authority autonomy and the ability that each local authority rightly has to administer and control its own budget as far as possible, and, on the other hand, the requirement—as put forward so ably by the noble Baroness who has just spoken—that there should be portability in the benefits or awards of assistance received by the individual in the event of a move from one local authority area to another. Will the Minister be able to clarify this for me? I am very much in favour of both but I do not quite see how we can have both. The operative word that seems to be missing throughout much of our deliberations is "flexibility". There must be flexibility in identifying the needs of the individual, in allowing for that individual to move from one area to another and for the local authority to manage its own financial affairs. These are the issues that need to be ironed out because if we ultimately go the full course and achieve in this country what the Government are evidently aiming for—the establishment of a national care service—that predicates a degree of centralisation, of central control, of central direction and of central funding. I am not happy about any of those things because we are dealing with real individual cases which need to be assessed at ground level by people qualified and trained to do so. I hope the Minister will help me out of my confused state of mind.