Personal Social Care: Funding

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I shall have to disappoint the noble Baroness: the proposals will be set out in the Green Paper and I will not give a sneak preview today.

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, Scotland has been giving over-65s free personal care for years now and is now running a feasibility study on extending it to under-65s. This is not the action of a Government who are unconvinced of the benefits. Will the Government consider running a trial in a defined English health community—say, the Manchester community or perhaps even Cornwall—to determine whether the benefits can be replicated south of the border; and, if not, why not?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I am not sure that a trial is required; what is needed is a systematic change in the way we do things for everybody. I am interested to hear what the noble Baroness says about the under-65s. One thing I can tell the House is that the Green Paper we will publish this year will deal with adults of not only retirement age but working age. Those were two separate streams that were working in parallel, but they will be contained within the same Green Paper.