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Adjournment (Whitsun)

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue and I am pleased to see so many of my new hon. Friends in the Chamber because they have just seen a classic example of how perspicacious my hon. Friend is. He made the very point that I was about to raise from The Times editorial. As my hon. Friend has rightly drawn to my attention, the practice has another knock-on effect, which is, as The Times editorial of last Thursday so succinctly said,"““the concern that the fees of people who pay for their own care””—" in residential homes—"““may be rising to make up a shortfall left by local authorities not paying enough to cover the costs of the residents whom they are supposed to support.””" If the state, through social services departments, is not prepared to pay an acceptable level of fee per person, it is morally wrong that the fallback position, to stop the homes going out of business, is that people with assets of more than £20,000 have to pay their own fees and that their assets are thus diminishing every year. There is a double whammy, adding insult to injury, as they have to subsidise the local authority-paid clients because the local authority will not pay a realistic fee. That is morally wrong. That situation must be looked into and addressed, because it should not and must not continue. It is for those reasons that I welcome the opportunity to raise these issues. I hope that, through the Minister, my concerns and those of my hon. Friends can be translated to the relevant Minister at the Department of Health, so that we can have intelligent investigation and discussion of the issues rather than a knee-jerk reaction. For eight long years we have found that whenever anything goes wrong, whenever there is a problem, it is everybody’s fault except that of the Ministers on the Treasury Bench.