Reform of Social Care

Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes]

My Lords, I was extremely pleased to hear this Statement and to hear it in the form that it has come. It must be well over 20 years since I first started writing to various Prime Ministers about the dreadful case of a constituent who had to sell his house—his life savings went into the house—to go into a care home, who said, “This cannot be fair. People who never bothered to save or to put money aside are getting the same treatment I am being charged for”.

On the other hand, and this illustrates the difficulty of the problem, the view of the taxpayers, also expressed to me, was, “Why should we have to support the inheritance of the sons and daughters of these people?”. There were two completely separate points of view that were very difficult to reconcile. As the problem becomes bigger and more urgent all the time, it is extremely brave of the Government to embark at this stage on a Statement that refers to the priority that will be given to this problem, and I welcome that very greatly.

[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.