Adult Social Care in England

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness makes an excellent point. We will certainly look at those funding models. Co-ordination, as we have been saying, is the way forward, because if you are a user of care in your eighties, you may be visiting a GP, you may be based in a nursing home, and to you, it ought to be one system and you ought to be travelling through it smoothly. Of course, we know that that is not the case at the moment, and the noble Baroness is quite right to highlight that there are great gains to be made, whether from having pharmacists in nursing homes or from having GPs coming to visit. Her point about technology and data is a good one. We still have an argument to win in reassuring people that their data are safe within the NHS so that they can be confident that they are used wisely for their direct care. That is the policy area I am now responsible for, since the election, so I am focused on providing that reassurance so that we can unlock the kind of innovation she is talking about.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, is the Minister able to give us any idea about when we may see the Green Paper for which some of us feel we have been waiting 40 years? Will it contain any revisiting of the Government’s response to the so-called Dilnot proposals about a cap on social care costs, about which there was so much confusion in the general election?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I am sorry to disappoint the noble Baroness but I am not able to give her any more details on the timing of the consultation.