That is marvellous. That makes it much easier.
As I said, I think we are making headway, but I do not think we are necessarily there. There are three elements to this amendment: the information campaign, which the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, will concentrate on in his remarks; special groups and housing, which the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, will address; and I will concentrate on the issue of advice.
Why do I spend so much time banging on about advice? This is an incredibly complicated area. The financial products are very complicated, and many people do not have a natural understanding of them. We all sort of know what a pension is. How many people, even in this House, know what a point-of-use care plan policy is? Who would be able to evaluate whether it was good value for money or bad? There is a large gap in the degree to which people know and understand the kind of products that can be involved here and the issues that can arise.
There is not a lot of this advice about, by the way. Some 53% of councils did not even refer people in care homes them for independent financial advice. Only 7,000 of the 53,000 self-funders in care homes have had appropriate financial advice. A point-of-use policy can ensure that they can go on paying for their care however long they happen to stay in the home. Their whole lives are at stake, yet hardly more than 10% have received the financial advice they need.
This is costly not just to the individual but to the councils. Nearly one-fifth of self-funders end up falling back on the state to pay. It costs councils £435 million a year, which is a substantial sum. Much of this could be avoided if people got appropriate financial advice. I do not think that this is not common ground with the Government, but it is, I think, a reason why the Government need to make absolutely sure that they get it right in what they do.
The need for financial advice has greatly increased as a result of the Dilnot scheme. The scheme has no stronger supporter than me, except possibly the Minister. I think it is a very good outcome to a very long and protracted debate. Nevertheless, it does make a lot of things more complicated. I will give an example that I gave in an earlier debate. You can apply for help under the means test and find that you are worse off if you get it because, although you get a little help under the means test, you lose attendance allowance if you get any means-tested support at all. I was amazed when I found that out, and I study this every day. How many people would know that unless they had the right kind of financial advice? That could come from citizens advice bureaux if their computer systems were up to it, but you really want an independent adviser to help you in the round. I do not think that is very controversial.
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It made me wonder why the original clauses in the Bill—and, as I argued earlier, even the revised clauses—are rather weak. I think I detected the answer in the Minister’s reply to the previous debate. What everybody is terribly worried about is a council saying, “Go and see Jones down the road. He will give you the right advice.” If that advice later turns out not to be very good, that person will not sue Jones or go to the Financial Ombudsman Service; he will sue the council. That seems to me a perfectly reasonable point. However, at the other end it does not work, either. It is no good if the council just hands him a list of financial advisers and says, “Why don’t you ring one of these chappies if you are not happy?” because that will not cause people to do it. What we are looking for is not a direction to go and see X, nor a vague offer that something might be a good idea if he wanted to do it. We need to nudge people pretty firmly in the direction of getting financial advice. Of course, any individual is free to say that they do not want that advice; that would then be their lookout.
I am not sure—and the House will judge when it has heard the Minister’s remarks—that even now we have cracked the dilemma of how we nudge. However, many local authorities are making very good progress in this field—for example, Nottinghamshire and West Sussex, which we have discussed before—setting up fora in which the local authority, independent financial advisers, citizens advice bureaux and the voluntary sector all co-operate and provide a service to people. Incidentally, some councils are doing this because they absolutely need to for the benefit of their own budget. A whole lot of people are moving out of inner London who are self-funders but who do not have enough money to go on self-funding forever. They will impose an impossible burden on those councils. The go-ahead ones are going ahead and the ones who do not like this area are not doing anything at all. That is why we need more vigour from the Government on this issue.
Furthermore, I am not convinced that enough is being done to get the regulation system up to speed. Regulation of advisers in this field was only reluctantly embraced by the old FSA. I am not sure that the new regime is doing very much better. I hope that the Government are doing enough to push it to take this issue seriously. Not enough is going on to make sure
that enough qualified advisers are coming forward. It is a very good job for an adviser now that the old ways of making money by flogging people dodgy investments are becoming increasingly difficult. This is a very good field and I would advise any reputable financial adviser with the right knowledge to think seriously about going into it. It is very satisfying work and can be rewarding. However, I do not think enough of it is going on.
I see here a great shortfall—to which my amendment would be only one part of the solution, but an important part—between what is needed and what is actually happening. It is crucial that the House satisfies itself that the Minister’s department really is gripping this and not being paralysed in the headlights by thinking, “Oh, dear, some poor local authority or the Government may get the blame if this goes wrong”. The whole Dilnot scheme depends on getting advice right. It is as strong and as simple as that. If it fails for the lack of dealing with the advice problem, we as a nation, and many older people, will be the poorer as a result. I beg to move.