Care Bill [Lords]

Does the right hon. Gentleman appreciate that it is possible to carry out lots of needs assessment—goodness knows, I carried out many of them in my day—but that unless care is available to allow a patient to be discharged from hospital, it does not matter how many needs assessments have been done? In fact, the longer patients are in hospital, the greater their needs will be—they will not be able to walk, their incontinence will increase and so forth. What is important is to put the cart before the horse and make sure that the funding of community-based care is there. It is not there at the moment.