Personal Care at Home Bill

Again, I have a very long note about all the different issues that I thought the noble Earl might raise to do with Scotland and all sorts of other things which I will not inflict on the Committee at this point. I will deal with the very important deafblind issue that he raised and make one or two comments about the generality of the other amendments in the group. I absolutely accept the point that the noble Earl made about the gravity of the situation of deafblind people and the problems that they face. It is very important that their needs should be recognised. There is no doubt about that at all. The services concerned are clearly of high importance to people who are deafblind or have multiple sensory impairments. As the noble Earl said, specific guidance, updated and published in June 2009, advises local authorities that they must ensure that services provided to deafblind people are appropriate and that deafblind people are able to access specifically trained one-to-one support workers if they are assessed as requiring them. For that reason we published statutory guidance on that issue. I have an assurance that the guidance that we will produce will cross-reference with that guidance. However, between now and Report I will have discussions with Sense and its supporters to ensure that we are doing that in the right way because this is very important. I reassure Sense that we are taking these issues very seriously and that they are taken into consideration, if not in the Bill at least in the guidance that we will produce. I undertake to do that because, apart from anything else, I want to reassure myself that this is okay. Amendments 9, 12, 31 and 43 seek to allow regulations on local authority functions and reablement to relate to overall care packages to individuals free of charge, and not, as the Bill intends, provision of the personal care element only without charge. I understand the intention of this is to ensure that the financial burdens for those in the highest needs are reduced as far as possible, but this falls outside the scope of this Bill and outside the cost envelope which has been allocated. It is fair to say that it is our intention to reform the care and support system so that it is fairer for all in the longer term, and we will be setting out in detail in the White Paper how we intend to do this. However, full care provision through taxation and free of charge at the point of need is something that we know is not sustainable now, or for the longer term, and was ruled out in the Green Paper. That is why we cannot accept Amendments 9, 12, 31 and 43, and ask that they are withdrawn.