Care Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Warner and Lord Rix

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rix]

How is it that the commission found that people with disabilities and elderly people helped to make up the deficit? I would have thought that they were the very last people in this country who should forgo support from the state system.

[Lord Warner]

I do not think we want to have a debate on our report, but I suggest that the noble Lord reads Chapter 2 which sets out the arguments why we should have consistency between the two age groups and why there was a fairness issue about that. If you distinguish between the two age groups, we favoured not being over-elaborate in means-testing working age people. If the noble Lord reads Chapter 2, he will see that we have in many ways discriminated in favour of working-age people in the treatment of them under a means-tested system. We were not being hard-nosed about it; we were saying that there was a general equity issue about treating people of working age and non-working age under the same architecture in this system. I do not want to detain the Committee with the Warner standard lecture on the Dilnot commission, but I recommend to the noble Lord that he refreshes his memory on Chapter 2, which sets out our arguments.

[Lord Rix]

I would not necessarily put working-age people at the top of the list. I talked about disabled people. I was asking how the commission found that disabled people should be called upon to provide funding to support the pay-off of the deficit.

[Lord Warner]

I do not think that we said that they should fund the deficit. We said how they should be treated under the architecture of a new system for funding care and support in the future.