Older Persons: Human Rights and Care

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, by far the worst abuse of older people is poverty. This welcome debate covers many other forms of abuse—ageism, elder abuse, inadequate care—and they are all very important. However, it behoves us to remember that, according to official figures, some 1.9 million older people live in poverty, which means that their income is below 60% of median earnings in this country. That is one pensioner in six.

Half a century ago, we were all very conscious of pensioner poverty. For one reason or another—perhaps because of better pensions and the rise in home ownership—that recognition has declined. Now, instead, people are talking about intergenerational fairness, which means giving older people less and younger people more. The research, including the excellent book by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has emphasised that the older generation has done increasingly well while the younger generation—generation rent—struggles. There is something in this, but it is a gross and important oversimplification. Rather than thinking of the elderly as one generation, we should think of two groups of elderly people. One group—I hope noble Lords will forgive me—is people like us, who are doing quite well. We enjoy wealth in the form of owning valuable homes that can be easily turned into cash through equity release. That wealth will be tax-privileged when we die, and on top of that we have had the chance to build pensions through our lifetimes: employer schemes, personal pensions and self-enrolment, which is now adding to our numbers. Meanwhile, the state has gone out of its way to hand us more dosh.

The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, referred approvingly to the triple lock. The triple lock is an absolute disaster, making us richer at the expense of much poorer working people—free bus passes; at 75, free TV licences. Last night I got home to find a large tax bill and with it, guess what? A piece of paper awarding me my winter fuel payment of £100—tax free, naturally. I have dispatched it to charity.

However, another group, the 1.9 million I referred to earlier, is materially seriously deprived. They do not own, they usually rent. They may not have adequate state pensions because they have not had the earnings record to get one, so they are forced back on to means-tested help. If they need care outside their own homes, they will be forced back on to the care that the local authority can provide. Local authorities now provide care only to people in gross need—care that is so cheap that it struggles to be inadequate. Those people cannot even look forward to leaving their struggling kids an inheritance.

These problems stem, in part, from deep social inequalities affecting all generations at all ages. However, in the case of the elderly there is one other factor that we should not ignore. It is a combination of the bad effects of two aspects of our politics. From the right has stemmed extreme restraint over public expenditure—austerity, if you like. That lies, for example, at the heart of the care crisis. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, the answer to the care crisis is more money. But I fear that we on the left have also made a big mistake through our belief that all state benefits must be universal. There has been a liberal wing drifting out from academia, and it still permeates large sections of the left. So we all get these universal handouts, I get my fuel allowance, and the result is that the money is not available to target the true causes of poverty in old age.

Yesterday I and many other Members of this House attended the memorial service of the great Lord Joffe. He was my ally in this matter. When we sat on the Commission on Long-Term Care in 1999, the majority wanted care to be a universal benefit, free to all who need it, paid for in full to the rich. Joel and I argued instead that the top priority for scarce public money was to spend it on better care services for the poor, not on these huge handouts to subsidise the rich and, more particularly, their children, who would inherit the money from them. Life is about hard choices. We can have universal benefits for the elderly, or we can target the poverty among the elderly that is making the lives of so many a misery. Alas, we cannot spend the same money on both, but I know which I would put first.

Care: Older People

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Lipsey]

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the deferred payment scheme for funding older people's care.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, it is hard to recall the shock at the time, but it is only a few weeks ago that the Conservative Party decided that it would not have a large overall majority after all. The form this took, you will remember, was a pledge in the manifesto that everyone would have to spend themselves down to £100,000 before they got help with care costs. I think I knew what they were doing when they did it because I happened that afternoon to be on a platform for the dementia society’s conference with the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. He made a short reference to this proposal and I was asked what I thought of it. I said, in the words of Sir Humphrey, “Very brave, Minister”. I may have misdetected it but I thought he went a little bit pale.

Why do I start with that story, which has absolutely nothing to do with deferred payment? It is very difficult to see why they did this. It could have been an accident. It could have been an outburst of honesty with the British people, which was laudable if not successful. I have another theory: that this Government have learned from long experience that you can do anything you want on care and nobody much notices—perhaps there would be more people here tonight if that were not the case. The case of deferred payments seems to me to be an extremely strong example on which the Government now need to focus and come clean with people on what they are going to do and put it into place.

Let me tell you a story—I am starting off down nostalgia lane. In 1999—I have the right decade, I think—I was sitting on the Royal Commission on Long Term Care. In parenthesis, one of my colleagues was Lord Joffe, whose death was recently announced, and who was one of the truly great and lovely men that I have had the pleasure to meet in my life. The majority of the commission—it beggars belief when you hear it now—wanted all social care to be free. That was their recommendation. I cannot really within a 10-minute speech spell out the number of noughts on the end of the cost of that proposal. It was bonkers for two other reasons. First, nearly all the extra money was going to the better-off, not the worse-off. Secondly, and to Joel and I more importantly, it did not provide an extra penny to care services. It simply made it easier for people to pay for care. Well, that is very nice and desirable if you have the money, but it is very different from providing the care services that our country desperately needs. So we did not go along with this and signed a note of dissent, as it was called.

I comfort myself that history shows that it is only minority reports or commissions that have any effect, looking back to Webb and the Poor Laws. There was one on the fire brigade, where the main dissident report was written by the chairman. Only minority reports have any effect, and that was true in one sense in this case. We never got free care and I am very glad that we did not.

However, Joel and I, when writing our dissenting report, were aware that people were suffering considerable distress as a result of the means-tested system. In particular, it caused people to sell their houses to pay for care. So without conceding the free care principle, we felt that something should be done about that.

I quote paragraph 57 on page 123 of the Note of Dissent: “We therefore propose that the state offers a virtual guarantee that no person will have to sell their home against their will. This will be put in practice by a state-sponsored loan against the value of the home of any older person in need of care who does not want to sell”. I think that that was right in principle because going into a home is for many people a dreadful thing to have to do. It is made worse if you know that your house is going straight on to the market with no chance of ever getting it back.

However, let us face it, there was a lot of politics in that. We wanted to fend off free care for all and in order to do that we thought it right to do something that would make redundant the headlines which the Daily Mail used to specialise in: “Homes sold to pay for care”. There was a general acceptance of that. The Labour Government legislated in due course. They did so ineffectively and left it to local authorities to put the schemes in place. Many local authorities did not get around to it, so it did not work. The Conservative Government seemed not even to have noticed that that had been done. David Cameron, who some will remember was then the Prime Minister, went around saying that the Government would legislate so that,

“no one will have to sell their home to pay for care”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/5/13; col. 25.]

The 2014 Act was brought forward and it did indeed establish a national scheme for deferring payment for care, except that it did not apply to people with more than £23,250 in non-housing assets. That is a terrific limitation and it destroyed what the scheme was meant to do. You would be absolutely mad, if you possess a large house, to let your other assets run down to £23,250 so that the income on that sum would have to pay for all the other little things in life you might like. It made the proposal completely defunct. That point was hammered home in this place. I remember making a speech about it at Third Reading with strong support being expressed across the House. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, gave the impression, although I may have been naive, that this would be dealt with and they would up the £23,250 limit. In the light of that, I withdrew my amendment. They did not; they stuck to it and the figure did not change. Of all people’s word to break, they broke the word of the noble Earl, Lord Howe.

I did not have to do much research to know what would happen. What has happened is that we now have a totally failed system. The Government estimated that the new scheme would bring the uptake of deferred care up from 4,000 in 2012 to 12,300, but it has not. In fact the uptake figure hovers at around 3,600; that is, even less take-up than before. The research to show that was carried out by the think tank Reform, which is not unsympathetic to the Government. That number is simply those who are eligible but who choose not to claim it—one third of the number that the Government said would. There are also all those people who are completely excluded from it by the arbitrary rules that the Government have set. Those were Cameron’s words backed by his party and both Houses of Parliament but they have been completely overruled and ignored.

I believe that Parliament was misled and that the time has come to do something about it. I believe—I hope the Minister will confirm this—that the Government are reviewing the deferred payments scheme and its impact. On the facts as we have them, I do not think there can be any doubt about what the conclusion of such a review should be. Of course, this is all part of the broader picture on social care. I, for one, welcome the review that has been carried out in the Cabinet Office, and the fact that we did not dash into that manifesto pledge and that proper, serious consideration is being given to this issue by proper, serious people on the basis of proper, serious research.

I beg the Government to look at this again, because you can make a case for the scheme or you can say that people should have to sell their houses to pay for care, but I say in all seriousness that I think it is unforgivable to mislead older people. They find this system extraordinarily complicated and extremely hard to get their heads round in any case. To leave them in the state of confusion that now exists as to whether or not they can get deferred care payments seems to me—I hesitate to use this phrase—an act of cruelty. The Government can put this right. It does not cost anything, because this is merely money that is lent to them being paid back. They should produce a clear, workable scheme so that those who do not want to sell their houses to pay for care will not have to, as David Cameron said.