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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, it is such riveting stuff that it is desperately difficult to keep away. I return to two issues that we debated in Committee. I put my hands up to the fact that these are issues for social care anoraks, but none the less they are important in the greater scheme of things. Amendment No. 24 returns to the question of which bodies are notified when the commission takes action under Clause 35. We talked at length in Committee about what would happen if action were taken against an individual social care worker. I understand, following helpful discussions with the Bill team, that in Clause 35 the bodies which are required to be notified are those responsible for the provision of care. We have so far not dealt with the fact that one of the standards on which providers will be judged is that they should only use registered staff if they are to be compliant. It seems to me that if a provider is found not to be compliant because they continue to use unregistered staff, that matter should be automatically reported to the General Social Care Council. I understand that under Clause 35(1)(d), ““other persons”” could include the General Social Care Council, but the General Social Care Council has an importance within the field of social care, being the registering body for social care workers, so I think that it merits mention on its own. Amendment No. 33 returns to the assessment of social care needs. I listened very carefully to the view put forward by the noble Baroness in Committee that commissioning would involve such an assessment. I disagree with that because very many PCTs, and increasingly local authority social services departments, are divesting themselves of their provider arms. They are in future unlikely to be commissioning large volume services for users with the growth of individual budgets and self-directed care. I was interested earlier to hear noble Lords talking about local authority homes. I do not think there will be local authority homes in future. In the group of amendments on agencies, spoken to by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, we underplayed the importance of brokers who will broker care for people who are going to buy it with individual budgets. So it is not fantastic to foresee a time fairly soon when local authorities will not be commissioning care, because that will be done under self-assessment and individual budgets. It is important to ensure that social care needs are assessed, even when they are not met and even when they are not recognised through the commissioning process. For that reason, I return to these two somewhat technical-sounding issues, but ones on which the quality of social care depends quite heavily. I beg to move.