Care Bill [HL]

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I totally dissent from the case that my noble friend Lord Warner makes. I have opposed Dilnot since the first day that it was made public as a report. My view is very simple. It will simply transfer money from those without to those with, and it has been introduced to appease—I repeat: to appease—the demands of those who insist on passing on inherited wealth from one generation to another, a most ignoble way of proceeding.

I think that my noble friend’s amendment is utterly brilliant—it deals with exactly the concerns that I have, and I hope that it does not end up in the department’s bottom drawer. I hope that when the Government begin to realise that the whole complicated process they are imposing on local authorities will inevitably lead to mistakes and errors and congestion and arguments between carers and people being cared for and their relatives and local authorities, they will sit down, have a rethink, and turn back Dilnot.

The Dilnot report is unjust as far as I am concerned in that it simply transfers wealth from one generation to another. I totally oppose it, and I think that my noble friend’s amendment should be enshrined in the legislation. My noble friend Lord Warner set out the remit as if members of the commission were somehow imprisoned in it so that they could not even consider this proposal. As I understand it, my noble friend’s amendments and the idea behind them were not considered by Dilnot. Sad to say, that is the case. I hope that in the near future this proposal will be resurrected—I hope by my own Labour Party.

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[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I support the comments made by my noble friend Lord Lipsey. There is a case for setting up some sensible monitoring arrangements. This is not just to check up on the Government, but to make sure that this system is working in the way that everybody wants it to. It is a big change, and we are starting from a position which means we have to grasp the nettle, as the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, said. I strongly support his amendments.

I want to refresh the House’s memory of what we said in the Dilnot commission report. I will briefly detain noble Lords with a quote:

“There is very poor understanding of how the adult social care system currently works and how much it can potentially cost. Many people live under the false impression that social care will be free if they need it. If people are confused over how the system works and the costs that they potentially face, they will not prepare appropriately for the future”.

That setting was why two of our 10 recommendations were that the Government should develop a major new information and advice strategy to help when care needs arise. To encourage people to plan ahead for their later life, we recommended that the Government should invest in an awareness campaign. We deliberately put those responsibilities on the Government. We did not put them on local authorities. We did this because we thought that unless the Government of the day—and this would apply to a Labour Government as much as a coalition Government—took a grip on this awareness campaign and planned the information and advice strategy, we would end up with a badly informed public and a mishmash of different local authority systems up and down the country.

We are not going to make this system work well or deliver the changes in the Bill and in the Dilnot commission report, unless there is investment. In our report we put the price tag of this as being a massive public awareness campaign. The public do not start from a position of being well informed about how they prepare for the future care and support needs that they will have in later life. The only way to start to change that is for the Government to grasp the nettle. I strongly support the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, to put this in the Bill. We should put a clear responsibility on the Secretary of State to run with the ball on this issue and, in effect, to monitor progress, not on a five-year basis but on a regular, annual basis. If we do not do something like this, we will live to regret it. We will see failure of implementation and failure to take the public with us on this major set of changes.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, my noble friend refers to the exhortations in the report to require the Government to carry out an awareness exercise. However, the reality is that there has been a huge spin on the whole Dilnot proposal. Many people, even those in care, believe that as of the starting date, 2016, everyone who has already spent something like £70,000 will suddenly receive free care. Of course, that is not true. It only affects people who enter the care system after a particular date. That is all part of the spin which has now led to a gross misrepresentation of what Dilnot proposes. Dilnot, while I oppose it, is offering a lot less than the spin suggests.

I want to talk about the reference in the amendment to the,

“implications of the cap on the cost of care”.

The implications of the cap on the cost of care are that there will be far greater transparency in the system, which was what the Minister told us in the debate that took place last week, when we debated the question of transparency. I argue that that transparency will lead to a lot of conflict between self-funders and people who are in receipt of support from their local authorities.

There is a group of people who will be over the means-test threshold but will pay the full cost under the cap. They will suddenly be confronted with information in this new regime of transparency which will give them far more information about what other people are paying in the home, what the local authority is prepared to pay and what the local authority believes to be a reasonable fee for care. That could lead to conflict within individual care homes and I wonder to what extent Ministers have taken it into account.

An amendment such as this is absolutely necessary because, before people are confronted with this decision when it comes later in this decade, it will at least give them some indication of where the truth lies and will perhaps bring an end to the misrepresentation that is taking place.

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The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, asked what impact Dilnot will have on the market. Our reforms will mean that people will be able to see the cost to the local authority of meeting their eligible needs. They will be able to compare that with what they might pay on the open market and will then have the option to request the local authority to arrange their care for an administrative fee. We know that many people will not want to have the local authority arrange their care but it is important that we fully explore the potential impact.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

If someone is below the £70,000 figure and funding their own care, why would they bring in the local authority? What business is it of the local authority?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, potentially, everyone in need of care and support may benefit from these reforms. We want to make it as widely known and as apparent as possible that planning is an important matter, whatever a person’s means. If I have misunderstood the noble Lord’s question, I will review that answer and write to him, but that is the main point.

I come back to the point I made earlier: this is just the beginning and it is why we will shortly be consulting on all these implementation issues. With those comments, I hope that my noble friend will feel able to withdraw his amendment and that other noble Lords will not press theirs.