Personal Care at Home Bill

I may be mistaken, but my recollection is that a number of years ago, there was a commission that made recommendations, and I think that my noble friend Lord Lipsey was a member of that commission. The majority recommendation was that nursing and personal care should be paid for, but that accommodation and care would—as already indicated—be subject to means-testing and so on. We now have a situation in which care costs and nursing costs are regarded as one, and I would agree with that. When the commission first made its report, I was in favour of it; but the report was not fully accepted by the Government, and so we had the distinction made between nursing and personal care. I always thought that that was not a very good division to make, because it very often came to virtually the same thing. In Scotland it was not accepted, and I see from an article which recently appeared in the Times that the allegation that Scotland is not managing to meet that cost is said to be quite untrue, and that Scotland is in fact managing those costs quite well. If this is what is intended in this section of the Bill, I would certainly be in favour of that, because I never believed that there should be a split between nursing and personal care. I always thought that they were the same care costs. If that is to be eliminated in this section of the Bill, then I would be all in favour of it.