Care Bill [HL]

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, in these matters. She has not only a lot of knowledge, but a great deal of personal experience. I always listen carefully to what she says. I refer the House to the register and to my interests particularly in certain charities which I shall mention. I, too, share the welcome that has been widely given across the House to this legislation. It has great potential to improve the lives of many people with a disability or who are elderly and frail. Simplifying legislation that affects local authorities’ care responsibilities is both timely and something that many of us hoped would happen for some time.

Like others, I share concern about the ability to fund such an ambitious piece of legislation. In the impact assessment available in the Printed Paper Office, I noticed that the monetarised benefits actually outweigh the public sector costs. If that is true, it is really to be welcomed, but I must tell my noble friend at the Dispatch Box that in Committee we will want to look carefully not just at the costs identified in the impact assessment, but at what are perhaps the glaringly obvious omissions, particularly future demographics. This Bill is very generous. To a degree, it seeks to underwrite the costs for people who currently do not receive state help with their care. The way in which the population demographics work out in this way is challengeable. I would say to my noble friend that what is really important is that we do not raise expectations through this legislation, only to find that they cannot be resolved.

I say this from personal experience. I remember some years ago when my son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was in his late 20s and lived permanently at home with my husband and me. As the named carer, I received through the post forms to fill in, asking me what my carer’s needs were. Every time this form came, I am afraid that I wrote across it in large letters: “If my son’s needs were met, my needs would be minimal”. They probably caught me on a bad day. As any carer will know, the reality was that sometimes even the very basic needs of the person you are caring for are not met. In a way, this Bill promises that this will be addressed. After all, what does “well-being” mean if not the well-being of the whole person? The well-being of carers is very much dependant on the well-being of the person for whom they care.

This is particularly relevant among those people who cannot advocate for themselves. We heard in today’s debate discussion about people with dementia, mental health problems and learning disabilities—so ably expanded by my dear noble friend Lord Rix. I have had an association with various autism charities and can say that these people need somebody to make the case for them—usually the carer, though there is not always an immediate carer. It is really important that this legislation will fulfil its promises.

I am a little concerned about one particular area. Although it is extremely welcome that throughout this Bill there are requirements to assess—for example, the person needing care or the carer—if those assessments cannot be fulfilled, there will be a huge feeling of let-down. My own experience, not just as a carer, but having served for nearly 20 years in another place as a constituency MP, is that all too often there is huge push-back and resistance to an assessment, even when there is a statutory requirement to provide it. This is purely because the people who are asked to carry out the assessments know only too well that whatever their conclusions, they cannot do very much about them because the resources are not there to deliver what that person needs.

It must be pretty awful for the people who carry out those assessments to know that if they do their job fully and properly, at the end of the day there is not an awful lot they can do to make a difference to that person’s life. I think my noble friend described the resources attached to this legislation as being about the engine working better rather than putting more petrol in the car. I would say to him that the engine needs to work better and he needs to fill up a few more times, otherwise I do not think that the resources will meet the need.

Looking quickly at the autistic community, I mentioned earlier that there are some omissions. This applies both to autism and to people with dementia, perhaps more elderly people who go on to have Alzheimer’s. There are a huge number of people who are still undiagnosed. In the autistic community it is improving, particularly with younger children. However, there is still an adult community with needs that do not always come to attention. As with those with learning disabilities, if they have been living at home with elderly parents who themselves have a crisis, it is the crisis of the person they have been caring for that comes to the attention of the authorities. All too often, that means crisis management and huge sums of money with all the disruption that goes with it to try to put some form of stability package in place at short notice.

This is not helped by something which the Bill aims to address—I hope it is successful and has been touched on by many speakers already today. This is the relationship between health and social services. When I was a constituency MP, I used to say, tongue-in-cheek, “We are having an ‘Oklahoma!’ moment”. Often people would come to my surgery with the typical problems of those who do not receive the correct services, or are carers who are at breaking point and cannot get anybody to understand their needs. For those who can remember it, “Oklahoma!” has a song with the line, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends”—but they never seem to talk to each other. That is the “Oklahoma!” moment, and it is quite easily resolved by Members of Parliament. When in my surgery or on the phone I was presented with a problem that quite clearly needed a group of people to sit around a table and talk about it, I used to cut to the “Oklahoma!” moment as quickly as I could. All too often, good things happen when an MP says to health and social services, “I think you should get together”. Indeed, I sometimes used to say, “Don't worry, I'm very happy to come along to the meeting myself”, which usually galvanised a few people. Problems were not always totally resolved overnight, but we started to make progress. It used to occur to me, “Why do I have to have this ‘Oklahoma!’ moment when all these people could be doing all this for themselves?”.

I say to my noble friend that, as we go through the Committee stage of the Bill, I will want to pay particular attention to those parts that seek to improve things so that we do not have “Oklahoma!” moments. The structure must be such that automatically there is dialogue and not stand-offs about who pays for what, because the difference between who funds the social care and who funds the health care is addressed in the Bill. All of this bodes well for resolving many of these problems, but I still have concern that if the resources are not available, we shall not do so.

Finally, it is important that we have a new piece of legislation on the statute book; the Autism Act. It has not really bedded down yet and it is early days. But the new Care Bill must ensure that the duties in the Autism Act statutory guidance continue to apply to local authorities and local NHS bodies to ensure the ongoing implementation of that Act. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me on that when he makes his concluding remarks.