Adult Social Care Contracts
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, I make it clear that the personal details of would-be service users should not be put in the public domain. The purpose of this system is to develop a tailored care plan that best meets the person’s needs and does not undermine their well-being. Where this has been done well, it has resulted in good-quality care while also, as I said, providing value for money for the taxpayer. We would not wish to make provision for spot checks of local authorities by the CQC but, where there is clear evidence that a local authority’s commissioning practices are leading to poor-quality care—which they should not be—the Secretary of State can order the Care Quality Commission to carry out a special review.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister will know that self-funders have been subsidising local authority places for decades. Have the Government measured what the impact of the increased cost on self-funders would be in the event that we were to go down the route suggested?
Earl Howe
My Lords, whatever system is chosen for commissioning care in a local authority, there has to be a fair system for setting fees. We expect local authorities to comply with their legal duties to sustain a high-quality market of providers in their area, and that involves paying fair fees. That is a matter for local determination. It has to be because, in seeking an open market, as we do, we are also aware that local market conditions have to be taken into account.
Earl Howe
I think that that would be premature. As I have said, we are developing statutory guidance for local authorities, as well as commissioning standards. We have no evidence to date that the process to which the noble Lord, Lord Laming, has drawn attention is leading to perverse results. If there is such evidence, we would be interested to hear about it. But until we are aware that there is a problem, I think that the noble Baroness’s suggestion is not timely.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I go back to my original question. Will self-funders be further subsidising local authority auctioned places?
Earl Howe
My Lords, it is impossible to give generalisations. As I indicated, it will depend on what happens in a given local area. We know that it happens at the moment but, again, it is impossible for me to make a general statement about how much or how little it is happening across the country.
National Health Service: Hospital Beds
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, is there any linkage between hospital-acquired infections and the reduction in the number of beds?
Earl Howe
My Lords, no. By comparing the OECD bed-provision data and the 2011 joint prevalence survey, the available European data indicate that bed provision and healthcare-associated infection rates across countries are not correlated. Indeed, as I have said, we have seen a dramatic fall in the number of healthcare-associated infections in hospitals, combined with a rising level of demand for in-patient beds.
Abortion
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, since the 1967 Abortion Act came into force on 27 April 1968, there have been more than 7 million abortions—around 600 every working day. I have some questions for the noble Earl.
As the law does not permit abortion on demand, and abortion was supposed to be a rarity, how in particular does the Minister explain the 66,000 repeat abortions last year—37% of the total—and the fact that, in some cases, individuals have had as many as nine repeat abortions? How does he explain that the majority of abortions are approved by doctors who have never even met their patients? Does he believe that Parliament and the law intended babies to be aborted after up to 40 weeks’ gestation on grounds such as having a cleft palate—breaking our laws on equality and discrimination? Does the noble Earl believe that Parliament wanted an estimated 4,700 girls to be aborted as just another choice, adding to the 160 million girls aborted worldwide?
Non-binding guidance is clearly not enough. Will he therefore amend the HSA1 and HSA4 forms to ensure that the two doctors required by law to authorise abortions only do so having directly asked whether the abortion is on the grounds of gender? On page 8 of its leaflet, Britain’s Abortion Law: What it Says, and Why, BPAS, which undertook 54,478 abortions last year with public money, asked:
“Is abortion for reasons of fetal sex illegal … ?”.
It then provides the answer, “No”. Why has the Minister not required BPAS to remove that advice? In a world in which we have such a low view of the intrinsic value of every life, what is being done to bring to book, using the Human Tissue Act, those National Health Service trusts that have been burning the human remains of aborted and miscarried babies to heat National Health Service hospitals?
These brief questions illustrate why the legislation needs, as the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, has told us today, careful review and amendment. Can the Minister think of a single comparable piece of legislation which has had such far-reaching consequences but has never been subject to post-legislative parliamentary scrutiny? Why does he think that is and will he ask the Secretary of State to consider allowing it?
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, we have half an hour left of this debate, and I wonder whether I could speak very briefly in the gap and ask a question.
Lord Popat
It happens that way in the Chamber, where we give four minutes, but not in the Grand Committee Room.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Andrews) (Lab)
I think we can allow the noble Lord to speak very briefly.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I want to ask this very simple question. It has been drawn to our attention by the noble Baroness, Lady Knight of Collingtree, that pre-signed forms have been found. Is it a breach of the law to sign those forms and, if it is, should prosecutions be brought in such circumstances?
Earl Howe
I shall copy all letters to all Peers who have spoken in the debate. My time is now running out but I know that concerns have been expressed, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, about the way that foetal remains are sometimes disposed of. A recent investigation by the Channel 4 “Dispatches” programme examined this issue. The type of situations highlighted in the programme, where foetal remains were incinerated rather than buried or cremated in line with what the woman would have wanted, are totally unacceptable. Any such practices should cease immediately. A letter has gone to all trusts to make that point emphatically clear.
My noble friend Lady Bakewell asked about hospitals revealing the sex of the foetus at routine ultrasound scans. Disclosing the sex of a foetus is a local decision and should be based on clinical judgment about the certainty of the assessment and the individual circumstances of each case. It is not something that the Government can mandate from the centre.
My noble friend Lady Knight asked about the NHS not employing midwives who would not be willing to perform abortions. The Act allows professionals, including midwives, to opt out of participation in any treatment to which he or she has a conscientious objection. That conscientious objection should not be detrimental to the careers of health professionals. I think I am over my time.
NHS: NICE-appraised Medicines
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Earl Howe
The noble Lord asks a very important question. It is slightly wide of the Question on the Order Paper, which relates to a particular set of statistics. However, I can tell him that I am broadly satisfied with the level of funding for AHSNs, and NHS England has given its commitment to maintain its support for them going forward.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
If the appeal is to NHS England or the commissioning groups, does that mean that they have the right to overrule the decision that has been taken by NICE?
Earl Howe
My Lords, patients have a right under the NHS constitution to access clinically appropriate drugs and treatments recommended by NICE technology appraisals. That is a legal right. If a prescriber has failed to adhere to that, a clinical commissioning group is bound to find in the patient’s favour. However, there are clearly individual circumstances for each case that need to be looked at. The key is that the patient is entitled to expect a transparent and fair process where the reasons for a decision are published.
NHS: Clinical Commissioning Groups
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, at present primary care is commissioned by NHS England and has three broad ingredients: primary medical care, primary pharmaceutical services and primary dental services. However, we are looking at ways of making the whole process of primary care commissioning more creative. That could well involve a joint process by NHS England and clinical commissioning groups.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
In light of what the Minister said before, are we being assured therefore that age and gender will not be given priority over gross health inequalities and needs in areas of social deprivation, such as in the north of England? If that is not the case, surely the principles on which the National Health Service was created are being undermined.
Earl Howe
My Lords, age is and has always been, in the formula, the primary driver of an individual’s need for health services. The very young and elderly, whose populations are not evenly distributed throughout the country, tend to make more use of health services than the rest of the population. Having said that, the formula contains elements relating to unavoidable differences in the costs of providing services due to location alone—that is, the market forces factor—and a number of other measures of adjustment. As I say, we are assured by NHS England that deprivation will feature in the formula that is published for next year.
Health: Local Healthwatch Organisations
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
If they are to have a role with regard to complaints following the recommendations in the Clwyd report, will additional resources be provided?
Earl Howe
My Lords, we will be responding to the recommendations from the Clwyd/Hart review in the context of our response to the Francis inquiry, so there is a limit to what I can say today. In answer to the noble Lord, I think that the local Healthwatch has an important role to play as patient champion and it is right that individual local Healthwatch organisations have access to information about complaints so that they can spot the themes and trends that emerge from them.
Care Bill [HL]
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, the Opposition strongly support the intention behind deferred payments. I hope therefore that the Minister will be able to give a serious response to my noble friend Lord Lipsey, because the issues before us are how the scheme is going to operate, the complexity that is necessarily involved and the ability of local authorities to do the right thing. Around all those matters, there remain some question marks.
While I would not necessarily support my noble friend on the specification of the interest rate, there are questions to be answered about how the Minister thinks the scheme will operate among the many local authorities which will be charged with discharging the scheme. For instance, on the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, we could see large differences emerge between different local authorities. That would be unfortunate, and I would be interested to hear from the Minister what work his department has done in trying to model how it thinks local authorities will operate the deferred payment scheme.
The argument for a model deferred payment scheme is pretty persuasive. Even if local authorities are to have discretion—I do not disagree with that—in operating their own scheme, surely the production by the Minister’s department of a model scheme would ensure greater consistency and save local authorities a great deal of work in having to work out the details of their own scheme. Given all their other responsibilities, as much support as possible should be given to local authorities. A model payment scheme would be very useful.
I have two points to make on my noble friend’s Amendment 92ZZY. First, it is very specific on the loans being made available for the purchase of point-of-need insurance policies secured against an adult’s legal or beneficial interest in their home. That raises the whole issue of the insurance market. I again ask the Minister to reassure the House that he is confident that the insurance industry is prepared to come to market with suitable products. I know that he commented on this last week, but there remains some doubt about whether insurance companies really wish to operate in this market. Given that the whole thesis of Dilnot is that capping cost would lead to the development of an insurance market, this is something that we need to debate fully and be reassured on.
On Amendment 92ZZZ and the commencement date, I agree with my noble friends Lord Lipsey and Lord Warner about the complexity of what local authorities are being asked to do. We of course need to consider delay, but I do not understand why a different date has been chosen for the deferred payment scheme in contrast to other parts of the Dilnot implementation. It does not seem to make sense and, I would have thought, would be very confusing for people involved.
That brings me back to the second part of Amendment 92ZZY, which is the issue of regulated independent financial advice being made available to a person considering taking out a deferred payment. Surely the Minister will have been convinced by now that the financial consequences of decisions made by people in relation to the provisions in this Bill will be momentous. I would have hoped that by now he would recognise that the assurance that can be given through independent financial advice would be an important safeguard. Unless we have that, I fear that many people will have to make very difficult decisions, involving potentially large sums of money, without the necessary advice. That would detract from the generally consensual way in which we need to go forward. I hope that the Minister will perhaps have some good news for us on that front.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I intervene briefly to ask the Minister a rather pedantic question. Subsections in Clause 35 all use the word “may”. There is no actual requirement for the Government to introduce regulations and therefore for local authorities to be placed in a position whereby they can charge. Why has it been left open, rather than using the word “shall”? If we could take the wording as meaning “shall”, can we assume that each further instance of the word “may”—that is to say:
“The regulations may specify costs … The regulations may require or permit adequate security…The authority may not charge interest under regulations…The regulations may make other provisions”—
is part of a whole package? Or, if “may” does mean “may”, might only individual parts of this clause be introduced, as opposed to the whole clause? For example, subsection (2) states that:
“The regulations may specify costs which are, or which are not, to be regarded as administrative costs for the purposes of subsection (1)(b)”.
If that particular part of the clause were not implemented, it would leave local authorities open to decide for themselves what the administrative costs could be. Whatever internal reasons they may have—and my noble friend Lord Lipsey referred earlier to the reluctance of local authorities—should local authorities have that ability to be flexible? I am seeking to establish whether, if this is all going to happen and we should read “shall” for “may”, all the subsections of Clause 35 will be implemented and that isolated subsections will not be introduced in the regulations. That might create difficulties that we are not foreseeing during the passage of the Bill.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for his amendments. He has a unique perspective, having first put forward the idea of deferred payments—as he reminded us—when a member of the 1999 royal commission. The Government share his disappointment that deferred payments are patchy and inconsistent across the country. Many people going into care face difficult decisions as a result, and authorities lose money when they offer a deferred payment because they cannot charge interest.
We also share the noble Lord’s commitment to ensuring that deferred payments work better in the future. We agree with the Dilnot commission that deferred payments should become a full and universal offer across the country for people who have to sell their homes to pay for residential care. We intend the scheme to be cost neutral to local authorities, as the commission also recommended.
We are proud to introduce this universal scheme from April 2015. It will provide much needed peace of mind to the 40,000 people who sell their homes each year to pay for care. As well as offering time to make decisions and choices over what happens to their home —a point well made by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey—it will open up new options, such as renting it out.
In his amendments, the noble Lord raises important questions about implementation. These concern the interest rate, the use of a deferred payment to purchase insurance, support for authorities to implement deferred payments and the timetable. Before turning directly to those amendments, it may be helpful if I briefly outline our plans.
Clauses 34 and 35 contain the necessary powers for us to introduce deferred payments. All authorities will offer deferred payments and it is our intention that people at risk of selling their home to pay for residential care will qualify. They will be able to defer reasonable residential care and accommodation fees, in the care home of their choice, for the whole of their lifetime. We are currently consulting on more detailed proposals on who will qualify and what fees they can defer, and are gathering more evidence on the costs and practical issues involved with offering deferred payments.
One practical issue that we are exploring in our consultation is the possibility of situations in which the authority cannot secure its debt through a legal charge on the property. This is why the Bill provides for other forms of security, including third-party guarantees. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, expressed doubts about this provision and wondered whether the proposals in the Bill may put people off taking out a deferred payment plan. Our guiding principle here is that we want as many people as possible to benefit from deferred payments, but it is equally important that local authorities are able to secure their debt.
Traditionally, deferred payments have been secured by registering with the Land Registry a legal charge on the person’s land, but this might not always be possible or offer sufficient security to allow the authority to recover its costs. Examples of this might include when a charge cannot be secured by registration with the Land Registry or where there is reasonable doubt about the person’s ability to afford the care home of their choice over the longer term, but we are consulting on whether there are situations in which offering a deferred payment is particularly challenging and, if so, on what a constructive way forward might be. That might include use of a different form of guarantee such as a solicitor’s agreement or the involvement of a third party. It is important that the Bill contains this flexibility so that when we design deferred payments to accommodate all situations that might arise, individuals’ preferences about the type of security that they wish to offer can be built in. I hope that this will persuade the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment, at least for the time being.
These issues will, in turn, inform how we set the interest rate, which has to strike an important balance. The rate must be enough to help authorities cover their lending costs but be affordable to people going into residential care who are at risk of selling their home. I understand the intention of Amendment 92ZZW to fix the interest rate at a predictable level but, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, might have sensed—the noble Lord, Lord Warner, may have alerted him to this—I am concerned that setting the rate in the Bill before we have finalised other aspects of the scheme is premature. We will announce the proposed interest rate following the consultation and decisions on the wider design of the scheme. This will be set out in the regulations that we will consult upon in 2014. It will be a nationally set, maximum interest rate and local authorities will not therefore be able to charge excessive rates.
I have tabled government Amendment 92ZZAA, which would introduce a new clause allowing authorities to make alternative arrangements for people who would not wish to have a deferred payment because of their religious objection to paying interest. I am grateful to the Islamic Bank of Britain for its help on this amendment. We will work with the bank over the summer to produce detailed proposals, and ensure deferred payments are available to such people.
Lord Campbell-Savours
But suppose that the local authorities come back and say, “We don’t want regulations to cover the issue of administrative costs”. What happens then? Is it possible that the regulations might be introduced excluding the requirement of administrative costs, if the consultation threw that up as a response? If it were possible, would it not change the nature of the debate that we are having today on this part of the clause?
Earl Howe
We fully expect a range of views about how to implement the proposals that we have set out in the consultation document. However, what we do not anticipate is wholesale objections to the very idea of the proposals, because by and large they are widely accepted as being the right ones. We need to ensure that they are capable of being implemented in a practical way.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I am sorry to press the Minister, but the point is that some local authorities—let us say Westminster, Maidenhead and Windsor or Wandsworth—may want to raise the charges for administrative costs while other authorities might be more sensible and reasonable about what those costs are. There has to be national uniformity in that area, and we should be given assurances today that there will not be flexibility, which would invite differential administrative costs between local authorities and trouble for many people.
Earl Howe
I can reassure the noble Lord that we are aiming to have uniformity. Merely because one local authority may present us with some rather maverick objections, I do not think that I could possibly envisage us capitulating to that kind of pressure. We want to see a system where people, wherever they live in the country, can rely on some clearly set-out rules and can thereby have peace of mind if they take out a deferred payment scheme. I hope and sincerely believe that the noble Lord’s fears will prove groundless, but I am happy to clarify as much of that as I can, given that we have only just gone out to consultation, in the letter.
Care Bill [HL]
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I totally dissent from the case that my noble friend Lord Warner makes. I have opposed Dilnot since the first day that it was made public as a report. My view is very simple. It will simply transfer money from those without to those with, and it has been introduced to appease—I repeat: to appease—the demands of those who insist on passing on inherited wealth from one generation to another, a most ignoble way of proceeding.
I think that my noble friend’s amendment is utterly brilliant—it deals with exactly the concerns that I have, and I hope that it does not end up in the department’s bottom drawer. I hope that when the Government begin to realise that the whole complicated process they are imposing on local authorities will inevitably lead to mistakes and errors and congestion and arguments between carers and people being cared for and their relatives and local authorities, they will sit down, have a rethink, and turn back Dilnot.
The Dilnot report is unjust as far as I am concerned in that it simply transfers wealth from one generation to another. I totally oppose it, and I think that my noble friend’s amendment should be enshrined in the legislation. My noble friend Lord Warner set out the remit as if members of the commission were somehow imprisoned in it so that they could not even consider this proposal. As I understand it, my noble friend’s amendments and the idea behind them were not considered by Dilnot. Sad to say, that is the case. I hope that in the near future this proposal will be resurrected—I hope by my own Labour Party.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I support the comments made by my noble friend Lord Lipsey. There is a case for setting up some sensible monitoring arrangements. This is not just to check up on the Government, but to make sure that this system is working in the way that everybody wants it to. It is a big change, and we are starting from a position which means we have to grasp the nettle, as the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, said. I strongly support his amendments.
I want to refresh the House’s memory of what we said in the Dilnot commission report. I will briefly detain noble Lords with a quote:
“There is very poor understanding of how the adult social care system currently works and how much it can potentially cost. Many people live under the false impression that social care will be free if they need it. If people are confused over how the system works and the costs that they potentially face, they will not prepare appropriately for the future”.
That setting was why two of our 10 recommendations were that the Government should develop a major new information and advice strategy to help when care needs arise. To encourage people to plan ahead for their later life, we recommended that the Government should invest in an awareness campaign. We deliberately put those responsibilities on the Government. We did not put them on local authorities. We did this because we thought that unless the Government of the day—and this would apply to a Labour Government as much as a coalition Government—took a grip on this awareness campaign and planned the information and advice strategy, we would end up with a badly informed public and a mishmash of different local authority systems up and down the country.
We are not going to make this system work well or deliver the changes in the Bill and in the Dilnot commission report, unless there is investment. In our report we put the price tag of this as being a massive public awareness campaign. The public do not start from a position of being well informed about how they prepare for the future care and support needs that they will have in later life. The only way to start to change that is for the Government to grasp the nettle. I strongly support the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, to put this in the Bill. We should put a clear responsibility on the Secretary of State to run with the ball on this issue and, in effect, to monitor progress, not on a five-year basis but on a regular, annual basis. If we do not do something like this, we will live to regret it. We will see failure of implementation and failure to take the public with us on this major set of changes.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, my noble friend refers to the exhortations in the report to require the Government to carry out an awareness exercise. However, the reality is that there has been a huge spin on the whole Dilnot proposal. Many people, even those in care, believe that as of the starting date, 2016, everyone who has already spent something like £70,000 will suddenly receive free care. Of course, that is not true. It only affects people who enter the care system after a particular date. That is all part of the spin which has now led to a gross misrepresentation of what Dilnot proposes. Dilnot, while I oppose it, is offering a lot less than the spin suggests.
I want to talk about the reference in the amendment to the,
“implications of the cap on the cost of care”.
The implications of the cap on the cost of care are that there will be far greater transparency in the system, which was what the Minister told us in the debate that took place last week, when we debated the question of transparency. I argue that that transparency will lead to a lot of conflict between self-funders and people who are in receipt of support from their local authorities.
There is a group of people who will be over the means-test threshold but will pay the full cost under the cap. They will suddenly be confronted with information in this new regime of transparency which will give them far more information about what other people are paying in the home, what the local authority is prepared to pay and what the local authority believes to be a reasonable fee for care. That could lead to conflict within individual care homes and I wonder to what extent Ministers have taken it into account.
An amendment such as this is absolutely necessary because, before people are confronted with this decision when it comes later in this decade, it will at least give them some indication of where the truth lies and will perhaps bring an end to the misrepresentation that is taking place.
Lord Campbell-Savours
If someone is below the £70,000 figure and funding their own care, why would they bring in the local authority? What business is it of the local authority?
Earl Howe
My Lords, potentially, everyone in need of care and support may benefit from these reforms. We want to make it as widely known and as apparent as possible that planning is an important matter, whatever a person’s means. If I have misunderstood the noble Lord’s question, I will review that answer and write to him, but that is the main point.
I come back to the point I made earlier: this is just the beginning and it is why we will shortly be consulting on all these implementation issues. With those comments, I hope that my noble friend will feel able to withdraw his amendment and that other noble Lords will not press theirs.
Medical Litigation: Impact on Medical Innovation
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, naturally I share my noble friend’s concern about the level of litigation in the NHS. Having said that, I have seen no evidence that a particularly large or indeed significant element of that bill relates to medical innovation. We need to reflect that all treatments in routine use in the NHS today began as innovative treatments. We continue to support the introduction of new and innovative treatments in the NHS. I think that, if anything, doctors have more concerns about being reported to the General Medical Council than they do about being sued.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, is there not a danger that the requirement to publish the patient mortality rates of individual surgeons will act as a disincentive for surgeons to innovate and take risks in circumstances where patients themselves might want those surgeons to take a risk?
Earl Howe
There is indeed a danger that if the information that is published has not been carefully scrutinised to make sure that it is balanced and reflects faithfully the performance of the individual surgeon or the surgical team. I share the noble Lord’s concern that we should not just release information that has not been carefully examined in that sense, but there is a value, I suggest, to patients and clinicians themselves to have benchmarking metrics against which to judge performance.
Care Bill [HL]
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Emerton
My Lords, I support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I also support what my noble friend Lord Rix said about closing the large institutions and providing the necessary housing. The reason the necessary housing could be found, either through charities or local authorities, was that it was clearly spelled out in government policy. I therefore strongly support the need for this provision to be in the Bill. Without that background, I would have found the job of closing two large institutions extremely difficult, because there was resistance from local authorities and local communities to providing suitable accommodation. However, as it was government policy, we were able to persuade and influence the local authorities to do it. Therefore, I support the amendments in this group.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I will speak primarily to Amendment 88, in the wider context of Clause 9, and put an idea to the Minister that dawned on me during conversations with local authorities that are faced with problems in this area. Clause 9 deals with the assessment of an adult’s needs for care and support. It states:
“Where it appears to a local authority that an adult may have needs for care and support, the authority must,”
carry out an assessment. The clause goes on to list what the assessment must include. Amendment 88 would add,
“housing options to contribute to the achievement of those outcomes”.
What struck me as an outsider looking into these matters is that, irrespective of the changes to which the noble Lord, Lord Rix, referred, problems still arise where elderly people—perhaps in their 80s, 90s or whatever—have to transfer out of their homes, which they may well own, or from hospital into some kind of care environment, perhaps a nursing home. I wonder whether it would be possible for that process to be made more seamless in circumstances where a local authority took on the responsibility of marketing—I shall come on to what I mean by “marketing”—the home for sale, clearing the home and making all the arrangements for the transfer of that resident, be it from their home or from hospital, into a care environment.
It may be that a local authority could offer a package. At the moment, that package, in part, is offered by some of the charities. I have spoken to charities, such as Age Concern, which carry out various components in this process of transfer but I wonder whether money could be raised by local authorities through taking a proportion of the commission on the sale of properties by estate agents. In other words, a local authority would advertise within its area and estate agents could tender for the right to handle the properties for which the local authority took responsibility in this process of seamlessly transferring people from their homes to a caring environment.
As estate agents would not necessarily know whether they would get that business if it was organised in the wider market, if they knew they were going to get all the business provided by the local authority—in other words, that they would be the estate agent responsible for carrying out the process of transfer in a particular district—they might be prepared to share their commissions with the local authority because they had access to business which they might not otherwise have had. It would provide a revenue stream.
As we introduce amendment after amendment to the Bill, I keep thinking, “Where is the money coming from?”. It has to come from somewhere. It is all right Parliament passing legislation placing all these new responsibilities on authorities but, at the end of the day, the local authority has to find a way of raising the revenue. If local authorities could somehow attach themselves to the revenue from the sale of houses, it might well provide an income stream—and what better way to do so than to provide a package for the seamless transfer of the elderly into a more caring environment? I put it simply as a proposition that the Minister might wish to consider over time.
Lord Martin of Springburn
My Lords, everyone supports these amendments. I do not wish to detain the House but I would like to add my voice to that support.
When I became a councillor in 1973, it was my duty to concern myself with the housing problems of constituents who lived in my ward. After seven years, when I became a Member of Parliament, I thought the housing problems would go to the councillor who took my place. That was not the case. Right up to my last week of being a Member of Parliament, I was still receiving housing complaints and problems. I recall in another life, when I was a member of the Labour Party, some of my friends saying, “Education, education, education”—that was the motto—but I said there should be something else: “Housing, housing, housing”.
If people do not live in decent homes, they will not be able to do anything. If dampness is coming down the walls, the brightest child will never be able to study properly and get the best out of his or her education. So I say to the Minister that sometimes it is the simple things that matter in housing, not the expensive things that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has referred to.
I have mentioned dampness. There used to be a great deal of dampness in some of the houses in my area of Glasgow. A scheme was introduced—all credit to the Government, as it was not just the local authority —to bring in central heating. What a difference it made to the health of the young and old who lived in those houses. They could get up in the morning to a warm house and go to bed in the evening in a warm house. It meant that bronchitis, emphysema and all the other problems were greatly reduced.