---

Personal Care at Home Bill

I have not really begun yet, but I shall of course give way in a minute. I find the situation very strange, because over the past decade Scotland has increasingly demonstrated that a policy of free personal care is unaffordable. Indeed, colleagues from other countries in the United Kingdom are present, and owing to the circumstances in which the policy was applied in Scotland, it has cost a great deal more than the authorities intended and they have had to cash-limit it, introducing therefore just the kind of unfairness in terms of access against which the Secretary of State now rails. Furthermore, the policy does not meet the accommodation costs of those in long-term residential care, so those costs have also escalated. The policy has not made people feel the intended sense of financial security. Those are all the reasons why a Labour Government said for many years that free personal care, as Scotland has offered it, is simply unaffordable in England and cannot be supported. I do not dispute that we supported that conclusion, because I made the same point myself. Indeed, a Government Green Paper published as recently as July said that to pay for the costs of care out of general taxation would impose an unreasonable burden on those of working age; that it would have a major, further distributional impact between generations and on those who continue to work; and that the Government therefore ruled it out. In July, as far as we were concerned, the Labour party was continuing to rule out free personal care, but in September, the Prime Minister got up at the Labour party conference and said that he wanted to offer free personal care paid for out of general taxation. There is no sense in which the Bill constitutes a bridge between the current position and the options in the Green Paper with which the Government are proceeding. They are talking about three options: the partnership model with universal care and a third of it paid for up front, a comprehensive insurance model, or an involuntary insurance model. Under none of the three models in the Green Paper would those with substantial or critical care needs have all their needs met out of general taxation.