I shall do my best not to be grumpy and to be as quick as the right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry). I wish to speak in support of new clauses 9 and 19. New clause 9 has support across the breadth of organisations from the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services to the Care and Support Alliance. It makes fundamental good sense, when setting up a new system, to have the ability to have an annual report about whether there is sufficient money in the system. Whichever Government are in charge, we need to know that. We are in danger of willing the ends but not the means for social care, and we have to make sure that this issue is kept under close review.
We all support the two fundamental principles of the Bill, which are about promoting individual well-being and moving towards a more preventive system. Those
are commendable and high ideals, but if we do not have the funding in the system to be able to deliver them, the Bill will not achieve the potential that we all know is there.
I spoke on Second Reading about transformation, and I look forward to welcoming the Minister to Salford on Wednesday to show him how we are transforming the system for dementia care in the city by bringing together £97 million of our total health and social care budgets to try to squeeze every bit of impact out of every last penny to give better care for people with dementia. I hope he will be impressed, but more than that I hope he will help us to do this with his better care fund. That fund should be used for the transformation of our services at a time of austerity when we need more money in the system.
The second part of the new clause is about having a five-yearly review of eligibility criteria, which is essential—to be frank, I would like to see that happen more often than every five years. Eligibility criteria are now set at “substantial” instead of “moderate”, which means that in Salford 1,000 fewer families are being helped, and the heartache and misery that that causes are enormous. It also goes against the second fundamental principle of the Bill. If we do not have eligibility criteria at the right level, how can we transform the system to be preventive? If we only pick up people when they are in crisis, they are escalated into the acute sector, which costs a fortune. If we invest in lower level community-based interventions by social enterprises and voluntary groups, we can save money in the acute sector.