My Lords, I rise to support this amendment and, particularly, to talk about the first two prongs of it. I do this partly from my experience as a member of the Dilnot commission. I remind the House what that commission said on the subject of an awareness campaign. We made only 10 recommendations, one of which was a very strong one because we had been incredibly depressed by the evidence given about people’s understanding of the present system, let alone the new one. When you have 60% of the population thinking that social care is provided by the NHS, you have a bit of a problem explaining to people how the system operates. Since they have not even mastered the existing system, you have to make a really big effort to get across some of the messages about the changes to it.
You could argue that it is a bit like Africa: if you have never had a landline and go straight to mobile phones it might be easier to make the change. Many people will not carry a lot of baggage about the existing system, but we do need to work really hard on this issue. That is why we said:
“To encourage people to plan ahead for their later life we recommend that the Government invest in an awareness campaign”—
we used the word “invest” very deliberately—
“This should inform people of the new system and the importance of planning ahead. This campaign could be linked into the wider work to encourage pension savings”.
Those three sentences were worked over very carefully and we said exactly what we meant on those issues. We said them as strongly as that because we thought that, to some extent, the success or failure of the changes encompassed in the Bill depend on that awareness campaign. I have not seen the Minister’s reply, but I have a suspicion—because I know how health Ministers get briefed—that there will be something about how this is not appropriate stuff to put in the Bill. I can see that there is some strength in that argument but if we are not to put it in the Bill then the Minister has got to start to tell us, in detail, what the Government are going to do.
The Government have had more than two years to think about this. We were made to produce a report very quickly indeed: within 12 months. It is now more than two years since it was produced and I should have thought we could expect a reasonably detailed plan from the Department of Health about how it is actually going to make the public aware. It would be nice if the Minister accepted the amendment, but if he is not going to, we need to know: where is the budgetary provision for the awareness campaign; what work has been done on the selection of people to help run the campaign; when it will start and how long it will go on for. How much are you going to pay for this? Do you accept the idea that all good awareness campaigns have some kind of follow-up arrangements? The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, has suggested an annual survey and I would not disagree with that. As he rightly said, these surveys are, from my experience, relatively cheap to do. Given the sums of money we are talking about in the Bill, this would be a very modest thing to do and there is certainly no point in having an awareness campaign if you are not going to check up whether there has been any increase in awareness.
There is a raft of issues where we need to have some detail from the Government on what they have been doing on this recommendation for a couple of years. If we have not got a very convincing story, we have to consider putting this in the Bill, to generate some energy and action in this area.
I turn to the second prong, which we have already talked a little bit about under the previous group of amendments. I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Lipsey said, and I want to return to the issue of mis-selling. We have had some serious problems in this country about the way the public has been sold financial products and we ought to be able to learn from history over that. It is not any old Tom, Dick and Harry who can give sensible advice to people about complex financial issues. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, is right: many of these issues are complex and you need a simple system to get to the advice, but the advice is not always going to be simple.
Let me illustrate that with the sort of circumstances that families and older people may be faced with. It is fairly common that an older person is going to give up their house; their spouse has died and they will have to give up the house. The family might well want to have a conference about what they do with that house. There are several options: they could keep the house and rent it for income; they could go for equity release; they could go for deferred payments; or they could go for a point of care plan, as my noble friend said. Choosing the best thing to do from some of those options is not straightforward; it will require someone who knows their way around some of these issues and can give advice to people and their families on how to make a sensible, good decision that fits their particular circumstances. The Government have to give more consideration to this.
I accept that not every issue will be complicated and there could be some circumstances in which the financial advice does not need to be given by a regulated financial adviser. However, the Government now have to do the legwork on separating the sort of situations where regulated financial advice is needed from those where one can be more relaxed about it. If we do not give guidance of some standing and credibility to local authorities, we put them in an invidious position because they will be damned if they do and damned if they do not. They need some advice on the sorts of circumstances in which they, to discharge their obligations under the terms of this piece of legislation, can point people clearly in the direction of advice that is likely to be appropriate to that person’s circumstances.
Lastly, I wish to make a point to the noble Earl about the Secretary of State’s new obligation under government Amendment 138 to have regard to the local authority’s requirement in Clause 1 to promote well-being. The Secretary of State is now pretty much in the same position as that of the local authority when he is producing guidance and regulations. It is at least an arguable case that he would not be fulfilling that requirement unless he put in place some credible arrangements for sound financial advice being given to people and he helped the public to understand the details of the arrangements of the new scheme that the Government were implementing. I am not a lawyer, but it would be worth a punt by going to lawyers to
argue that the Secretary of State would be in breach of his new obligations if he took a cavalier approach to financial advice and awareness of the new scheme.