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Health and Social Care Bill

I declare an interest as the chair of the new charity, Livability, which is a combination of the very old charities of John Grooms and the Shaftesbury Society. We recently ran a campaign called ““Freedom to Live””. I apologise that I shall have to leave fairly soon to go and chair the board of Livability, but I felt that I must stay to speak. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, far from being inexperienced, as she described herself, made the most eloquent case for an amendment that I have heard for a long time. I congratulate her on that. For the Government, this is one of two questions in the ““too difficult”” box, but they could be dealt with quite simply. The two questions are how you deal with someone who has complex difficulties and needs to have the freedom to live and how you move between sectors, which we are not dealing with here. That question is even more complex; if you want to move out of residential care into housing provision or supported living, it is nigh impossible because of bureaucracy. All those things could be dealt with and we would not even need Amendment No. 209A if the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, was agreed to. A person with complex disabilities might have a package that moved with him and an assessment might be agreed across authorities. I know that seems like nirvana because I have been a director of social services and know the difficulties involved. Ordinary residence and the need for the package to go with you have been fundamental subjects of debate since the 1960s, and we have still not resolved the issue. If I want to move from one place to another, I can probably contend with the fact that the doctor may not be as good in one place as another and that the hospital in one place may give me a better service in certain areas than in another. But if you have profound difficulties with your physical condition, such as the noble Baroness deals with, it is crucial that what you have gained to live your life and the package that you have built up over a period of time is secure and can be taken with you to the next place. Otherwise, as the noble Baroness pointed out, you have no freedom to live. There are other areas in which people’s human relationships are interfered with. One young man I know would dearly like to live with his girlfriend. He lives in residential accommodation and would find it very difficult to live independently. His girlfriend lives in a residential home at the other end of the country and, because there cannot be any agreement about how their packages can be joined together, they remain miles apart. We do what we can to ensure that they can meet up, but it is clear that their life quality would be enhanced hugely were it not for that difficulty. They have no freedom to live in their relationship. The Minister is likely to say that the amendment may not be acceptable. However, I encourage her to go back to the Government and try to resolve these extraordinary difficulties that result in one section of our community having a quite different capacity for quality of life, despite being quite capable of leading those lives, than some of us enjoy, simply because we cannot sort out the bureaucracy of packaging. The cost to the nation as a whole is going to be the same, but it comes down to postcode and geography. I hope that some solution can be found to this very complex but manageable problem.