Elderly Social Care (Insurance) Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Well, my Lords, this Bill may be many things but, in response to the noble Baroness who just spoke, irrelevant it is not.

I never thought that the apostle of privatisation would propose a measure of nationalisation to your Lordships’ House; he came clean on that, of course, but my belief is that my noble friend Lord Lilley—I am pleased to call him a noble friend—has done the House a great service. When she spoke, the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, reminded us how urgent this matter is. Incidentally, how good it is to see her among us in the Chamber. She has been assiduous on the screen but is much better in the flesh. She underlined the urgency.

If you want to underline the urgency still further, it is nothing less than a disgrace that the brilliant report produced by the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and presented to Parliament on 20 April last year, has yet to be debated in your Lordships’ House. I hope the acting Whip will take note of that and say that we want to deliver a collective rocket so that it can be debated in this House. It is right that it should be debated, alongside the ingenious set of proposals from my noble friend Lord Lilley.

The one thing we cannot escape is that this is an urgent crisis. We have to forsake some of our notions and shibboleths, because when my noble friend Lady Altmann said that this matter should be rolled in with the National Health Service, I believe she was absolutely right. Why have we not faced properly the problems of the health service? I rabbited on about this in the other place and have done so in your Lordships’ House. We have to face up to the fact that we cannot afford the National Health Service unless we have a special tax or charges on certain things for able-bodied working people, often earning high salaries, or a combination of the two. If we are to have a world-class health service, across the board—we have been reminded this year of how much we need it, and of the wonderful dedication of those in the NHS; how richly they deserve their GC—and world-class social care, it has to be paid for. I believe it has to be paid for by special tax or charges. I favour a combination of both.

My noble friend has performed a signal service by bringing this Bill before us. I hope it receives a Second Reading, so we can go into more detail in Committee.