Social Care Funding

Lord Warner Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her remarks. She is of course quite right; many of us have heard for years the concerns of members of the public, friends and family about what might be the catastrophic burden of care costs in old age. If there is one thing that everyone should welcome, it is that aspect of this announcement. With regard to a rebate, no, that is not in our sights at the moment. If someone were to die in the circumstances posited by my noble friend, the arrangement would have to remain as set out to that person at the outset. We would not expect to move the goalposts after that person had died.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I should declare my interest as a member of the Dilnot commission. It would be churlish not to welcome the Government’s acceptance in large part of the Dilnot architecture for reforming the funding of social care for the medium and longer term.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister. As I understood what he was saying, the new capping system is likely to start in 2017-18. I understood him to be saying that a new national threshold for eligibility criteria would start at the same time. That would therefore mean that the present eligibility criteria, interpreted by local authorities, would stay in existence for another four years, so we would have four more years of the tightening of those eligibility criteria.

I remind the Minister of a paragraph in our report that drew attention to the fact that there was strong evidence of a major shortfall in the existing funding of social care that could not be put right by our recommendations, and that if those problems were not resolved on a cross-party basis, they would simply undermine the functioning of our recommendations in the medium to longer term.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I hope that I can put the noble Lord’s mind at rest. In doing so, I thank him once again for the work he did on the Dilnot commission. It is our intention that the eligibility criteria will be introduced from April 2015—so, in advance of the Dilnot arrangements. As he well knows, that national minimum eligibility will be set to make access to care more consistent around the country. In addition, carers will have a legal right to an assessment to care for the first time. I take his point about trying to achieve cross-party consensus on social care funding.

As for funding in the existing system, in the last spending review we made, as he knows, an additional £7.2 billion over four years available for care and support. Since then, we have provided local authorities with an additional half a billion pounds. We believe the challenge creates an opportunity for local authorities to innovate and to explore new ways of working better to meet the needs of their local populations and to optimise the use of the resources that they have. Many local authorities are already innovating, and we are committed to supporting them to deliver further service improvements.