Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I share exactly the same concerns as the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, but I am afraid that I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion for the very same reasons. My reasoning is based, to a large extent, on the work I have done over the past year with a number of local authorities and, more importantly, a number of voluntary organisations. I always think it is worth pointing out what is going on right now in world of social care. Local authorities and voluntary organisations—the key providers of information and support to the recipients of this care—are currently dealing with large-scale tendering of services, in many cases for the first time, and, at the same time, implementing the personalisation agenda. That is having a huge and immediate impact on the process of assessment and resource allocation. A number of councils—some of the most enthusiastic for the personalisation agenda—have been moving towards implementation of care brokerage. Even the most advanced councils that I know of, such as Kensington and Chelsea or Richmond in west London, are in the early stages of pilot schemes which are funded for one year and have not yet been evaluated. At the same time, local authorities are achieving the very same efficiencies that we are supposed to believe they will be using to fund the implementation of this Bill, in ways that will also have a direct impact on it. They are tendering information and advice services on a generic basis. I am sorry because this is a very "anoraky" argument, but previously, information and advice services were largely provided on a client-group by client-group basis. But they are not now: they are being generically tendered for all adults over the age of 16. People with mental health, drug and alcohol problems, physical disabilities and carers will all be in the one contract. That will be a huge change, particularly for providers of information and advice. The information, advice and support services, which are always needed to make any change of this sort work—and they will be needed to make this work—are in turmoil. For that reason the noble Lord, Lord Best, is right. I am not always particularly enamoured of provider arguments about their being overloaded, but these people in local authorities have a strong argument. A huge amount of change is going on. For example, seven local authorities in west London are coming together to tender all their information and advice services as one in order to achieve the economies that they are having to make. I hope noble Lords will understand that on the ground that is a monumental change. There will be a change of personnel and a change of practice. If this change goes ahead, there is a risk that a large number of people will not get this service to which they are entitled and will get no service at all because there is such confusion. Notwithstanding the will of people to make services work better, more efficiently and in a more personalised way, I say to the Minister that whatever the intent of the Government the timing could not be worse. For that reason I support the argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Best.