Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, and to the Minister for her reply. I am glad that she did not give us the benefit of a short talk on local government finance: no doubt we will come to those matters later when we talk about the affordability of the Bill. I agree with her that there is only one way forward when it comes to reform of long-term care, and that is cross-party consensus. By definition, we should look at a long-term solution that will hold good for many decades to come. I share her wish that the parties will come together and find a common way forward. It was partly for that reason that I wanted to see this Bill as a genuine bridge towards long-term reform, because I fear that to describe it as a bridge at present is an inaccurate use of words. The problem I have is that it is too narrow in its scope and too prescriptive. It might be worth my quoting to the noble Baroness a short extract from page 16 of the Government’s Green Paper. It states: ""Because care and support costs can be so high, we think that the Government should provide some support to everyone who has to pay them. We therefore propose that, in the new National Care Service, everyone who qualifies for care and support from the state should get some help with paying for it"." That is a much more tenable and intellectually respectable approach than the one which the Bill invites us to take. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, asked me about the kind of preferential system that I was trying to advocate. Maybe she and other noble Lords were not here to hear me talk through that idea. You can achieve it in several ways with varying degrees of central prescription and local autonomy. My amendment would not rule out any particular solution. For example, you could have a graduated scale describing a varying acuity of need, defined centrally, as the foundation for a graduated charging system. That could be moderated at a local level by consideration of people’s financial means and the affordability of certain charging bands. Revised fair access to care services guidelines could well act as the basis for a more sophisticated charging structure, but you would leave it to local authorities to decide exactly how the available cake should be cut. Free care for those in critical need would not be precluded under my amendment. It could still be prescribed in regulations. However, you would at the very least avoid the cliff edge which the Bill will create in terms of its perceived unfairness towards those whose care needs are deemed to fall very slightly short of the level eligible for free personal care at home. That, in a nutshell, was where I was coming from. However, I have no fixed views on how one would structure this. It is for discussion. That is as far as we can go at this stage. I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s comments, upon which I will reflect. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 5 withdrawn. Amendment 6 not moved.