---

Personal Care at Home Bill

Apparently that will happen with no loss in transaction costs in the process. That is absurd. We know why the Government have ended up in that position. Under pressure, they did a U-turn, but to put it gently, it has left them looking very exposed. For the longer term of the introduction of the reforms, the Government intend to integrate those disability benefits to pay for the up-front, universal entitlement to care. The effect would be to take away a cash benefit that recipients can use to meet a range of needs and costs and to substitute a care package. From our point of view, that remains unacceptable. We need to buttress and strengthen the right to control, and to personalise, care services, and continuing access to a cash benefit remains important for that to happen. In response to the Secretary of State's statement on the Green Paper in July, I said that it is important to reach a common assessment of need—one that informs the non-means-tested cash benefit and the means-tested or insurance-funded social care entitlement. As with the extension of personal health care budgets, care users need the assessment process overall to become simpler and more integrated, for the resulting budgets and assessment processes that arise to be applied flexibly to meet their needs, for there to be a choice of providers, and for the assessment of need to be portable, as people will inevitably move around the country.