Care and Support

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for all the work that she has done in this area, particularly on portability. This is a good news story. We are committing in the White Paper to breaking down the major barrier to portability: that people’s care is disrupted when they move local authority area. The draft Bill contains a clause that puts a duty on to local authorities to ensure that when a person—and their carer, if applicable—moves local authority area, their needs continue to be met until they are reassessed by that local authority. The clause also sets out that local authorities are under a duty to share information, and the receiving local authority has the power to assess the individual—and carer, if applicable—before they move. This seeks to ensure that the move is as seamless as possible. I do not doubt that this is an area that we shall debate over the coming months.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I emphasise the extraordinary importance of all-party consensus on this matter. Without that, older people and their families will not know what to plan for in the long term, and indeed insurance companies that could help out will not be able to design policies to help them do so. Will the noble Earl deplore the leaking of the documents in front of us this afternoon? The leaks greatly exaggerated the benefits that the actual policies announced will deliver, and have derailed the all-party talks. These policies should have been floated with the Opposition before they reached the public domain. I am not saying that he did it, but will he apologise as a way of getting those all-party talks back on an even footing?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I fully agree with the noble Lord about the need for cross-party consensus. If we are to have a long-term sustainable solution for the funding of social care, we must have that political consensus. Indeed, that was the intent behind the cross-party talks. I very much regret the leaks. These were not our doing, but they did create an impression of bad faith. Again, I regret that. No bad faith was intended from our quarter or indeed from any other quarter in government. I think there was an element of misunderstanding about our intentions, but I agree with the noble Lord that the cross-party bonhomie has been disrupted. We very much wish to put the whole process back on track, and I hope that his party will respond accordingly.

Funding of Care and Support

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the Society of Later Life Advisers, which trains independent financial advisers specialising in elderly care. I want to concentrate on the role of the private sector. I strongly endorse, as every speaker has, the key features of Dilnot, which build on the minority report of the 1998-99 royal commission of which the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was such a distinguished chairman. Sadly, however, four months after Dilnot, his core proposal, a cap on care costs, is in danger of going down the pan; first, because of the cost and, secondly, because the Government are chary of opening up this wicked issue. The job of the House today is essentially to save Dilnot.

On private insurance, there are only about 30,000 insurance policies for long-term care extant at the moment. There are so few largely because of a lack of demand. People do not know about care costs and too many assume that the state will pay, which is why the work of SOLLA is so important; why local authorities need to do more to help self-funders understand their options; and why a state information campaign—call it a national care service, if you like—is essential. However, that does not apply just to the demand for policies, but to the supply.

The main reason why insurance companies have been so chary of getting into this area is the fear that people will live longer and longer—we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about how fast the expectation of life is increasing—and that the costs of that care will bankrupt the companies. Without a state-funded cap which limits the liabilities of insurance companies, mass private insurance is a dead duck. With a cap, one can envisage a huge expansion in policies, many of them funded from the proceeds of equity release on people’s valuable houses. Enhanced annuities are another promising avenue; for example, a pension that increases if an individual becomes disabled later in life and needs care. In Asia, policies have been developed whereby a sum of money is set aside which can be used for a person’s care if they need it but can be left to their children if they do not, and so on. However, without a cap at some level or other, none of those schemes is likely to develop on any scale.

What should the cap be? I have just one criticism of Andrew Dilnot’s admirable report. As a cap on the costs that an individual must bear, £35,000 is too low for three reasons. First, it would cost the state too much—£3.4 billion by 2025-26. At a time of austerity, that will not happen. Secondly, it gives too much benefit to the better off. Let us remember that the poor will not get a penny of this money because their care is free now. Therefore, it goes entirely to middle to upper income people or, rather, their heirs. I do not say that they should not get any of it but if it is too high a cap, too much will go to the better off. Thirdly, because the cap is too low, most people will not bother to insure privately. They will say, “I can run to £35,000 out of the proceeds of my £300,000 or £400,000 house. I won’t bother”.

What should the level of the cap be? I am afraid that I do not know but that is not due to a lack of assiduity on my part. On 11 July, I asked in a Question for Written Answer what the cost of a £100,000 cap would be. The Minister replied with what I think these days we should call a “Baroness Trumpington”. In private communication the Minister has been his usual helpful self, but we still have no figure of a £60,000, £75,000 or £100,000 cap. I take with a pinch of salt his department’s contention that this is a hard calculation to do—with a ruler I could get quite near it myself. We will have to see what a freedom of information request can do to get an answer out of the Government.

But the more fundamental argument that the Minister uses against a higher cap is that the financial services industry does not want it. He cites the Government’s consultation on Dilnot, which favours a £50,000 to £60,000 cap. My own consultations with the financial services industry—I am in quite close touch—suggest a more mixed picture. Some companies want a low cap, say £35,000, and some want a high cap, say £75,000. However, the crucial point is that nearly all financial services companies agree that we need some cap. The Government’s consultation, cited by the Minister, states that support for the cap is overwhelming. The point is that the choice is not now between a £35,000 cap and a higher cap because the Government will not fund a £35,000 cap in present circumstances. The choice is between a higher cap and no cap at all. If there is no cap, there will be no role for private insurance. It is as simple as that. A cap is what we must get.

What do we want from this process? We want a settlement that will endure and enable private insurance to play its part alongside state provision and state funding in a deal on the matter. When do we want it? We want it, if not now, at least by the time of the White Paper next April, before another generation is condemned to inadequate care and crippling financial anxiety.

Reform of Social Care

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I thank my noble friend Lady Oppenheim-Barnes for those remarks. The House will know that her experience of these matters goes back many years. She is right; these thorny issues have been with us for a very long time and we have to get a grip on them. There is, as I made clear earlier, a clear imperative to inject certainty and predictability into the system, but there is also a need to strike a balance between the state and the individual. That principle was one that the Dilnot commission articulated—overreliance on the state would be unsustainable and arguably unfair, and overreliance on the individual presents obvious problems of a different sort. It is that balance that we need to identify.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, as a member of the Royal Commission on the funding of Long-Term Care for the Elderly, which so singularly failed to find any consensus—my fault, no doubt, as I signed the minority report—I welcome the Dilnot report very much as bringing us nearer to the kind of political consensus on this issue that is intrinsic to its final solution.

However, we should not take the proposals in Dilnot as written in stone. There are severe problems of cost and the fact that they do so much more for the very rich members of society and so much less for the middle. Will the Minister—who has rather wisely stretched out the consultation period on this—assure the House now that although Dilnot’s fundamental architecture has a great deal to be said for it, the Government will keep a very open mind on the details throughout the process ahead?

[Earl Howe]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, and broadly my answer to him is yes. They are clearly a set of well considered recommendations which we think are eminently worthy of serious study as a basis for cross-party consensus. However, I will not be tempted to pin my colours to any mast that the Dilnot commission has erected because it is important that we have this consensus as far as we can generate it, and that will mean looking at the detail and at individual recommendations on their own merits, maybe taking forward some but not others, and maybe looking at a staggered timetable. These are all questions that we have to resolve between us.