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Older People's Rights (Health Care)

I am afraid that people in more or less equivalent positions often have vastly different rights. There are many examples of such situations. I should like everyone to be protected by the Human Rights Act in every circumstance, but that cannot be done through the mechanism that the hon. Gentleman advocates. I do not want to get into a completely different debate, especially as it would get very technical, but the Act is there to protect people who receive services from public authorities. As a result of the YL case, a private care home is not a public authority. We can correct the problem for publicly funded recipients of care services, because they were originally intended to be covered by the definition of a public authority. Indeed, there are several mechanisms by which we can make that change, and the Government will have to choose which mechanism to use. The difficulty arises when we try to bring into the equation self-funders, who have no direct relationship with the state, because that means trying to make the Act do something that it was never intended to do—protect self-funders in relation to private providers. There is a convoluted argument that if there is significant state regulation, that is sufficient to make something a public authority, which it would not otherwise be. I am not entirely convinced by that argument, although I see where those who make it are coming from. In the interim, we have to find another way of protecting self-funders, which is what the Government are trying to do. In the long term, we must reform the definition of public authorities so that everyone who receives public services is covered, not just those in care homes. I gave examples earlier of others who might be covered. That is reform No. 1. Reform No. 2 concerns the wider issue of horizontality, or the extent to which human rights should be directly enforceable more generally, outwith the issue of care homes, between private individuals or between private individuals and companies. That is a wider argument, and it falls within the much bigger debate on the Bill of Rights. There are therefore three different stages: sorting out the YL case in relation to care homes, sorting it out in relation to the wider recipients of public services, and sorting out the general issue of those who receive privately funded services from private organisations. Each of the three stages has a different solution. In the meantime, we must try to find a way of protecting private funders in care homes through other mechanisms, giving protection that is equivalent to human rights protection. In the report, we discussed whether it would be possible to provide better protection against eviction, not necessarily within the context of the Human Rights Act, but under landlord and tenant law. The issue is one where non-lawyers might fear to tread—