Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this. However, the eloquence of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, took me back to my days as a director of social services, when we policed the boundaries with the NHS, and it equally policed those boundaries, with great vigour in the 1980s and 1990s. A serious issue for the Government, which is made worse by this Bill, is the way that at a time when we are saying we want to take down this Berlin Wall, we have created, with the best of intentions, a whole range of areas with scope for more disputes between health and social services. They all had a good reason at the time—intermediate care, continuing care, and now free personal care at home. I wonder whether the Government know how many people are now engaged in these various assessments, how those numbers will be increased by this Bill, and how many people are being diverted from providing care to patients and service users in the area of carrying out assessments and policing those assessments in order to see that their particular organisation is not disadvantaged financially. If things have been bad at a time when finances are generous on both sides of the Berlin Wall, they are about to get much worse. There seems likely to be a climate where policing of people’s responsibilities organisationally and financially will increase. I ask the Government to think through this much more carefully—I think that it has been considered—and to have a serious discussion with the directors of adult social services about the number of people now entrenched in this work, which is not of great use for the provision of services to people who need them.