Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I support Amendments 38 and 46, particularly Amendment 46, on the grounds that they would both require some further action in Parliament before the Bill came into effect. Indeed, I do not see how the Government could honourably object to having a procedure of this sort. I have criticised the process by which this policy was abruptly adopted and introduced, but I leave that aside. Nobody could listen to the debates today without being aware of the serious concerns among those in the frontline about the incentives that this Bill would introduce, and nobody could be unaware of the controversy about the costs of the Bill and the uncertainty about that. As the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has said, the consultation procedure does not even finish until tomorrow. There used to be—I hope there still is—an honourable convention that, in the lead-up to a general election, a Government did not take decisions which would commit the next Government to very wide-ranging and possibly irreversible activities. However, when the country is in the economic state that it is, to introduce a policy which, on the Government’s own estimate, would cost £670 million a year, the source of which has not been identified, is in my view "worse than irresponsible", to take the expression of the noble Earl, Lord Howe. We have a situation where the Government are arguing that it is too early to start reining back public expenditure to reduce public debt, and that is a big argument in the politics leading up to the general election. It is one thing to say that it is too early to cut back expenditure; it is quite another to force through in the weeks before a general election a policy like this, which would impose on the Government after the election a very large and indeterminate piece of extra expenditure. The Government may win the general election. If they do, it will still be in the Government’s interests to have had a pause for reflection, to have taken into account the outcome of the consultations and to have considered the regulations which should be brought forward before they bring this Bill into effect. If they lose the general election and the Opposition become the Government, for the Government to have forced through this legislation in advance of the election is, in my belief, in the highest degree irresponsible. I do not speak from a politically partisan point of view when I say that. In political terms, the Government might regard this as a piece of scorched earth; I think, in national terms—and I do not use these words lightly—to force through this legislation, in advance of a general election, and to impose it on an incoming Government would be an act of national sabotage.