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Personal Care at Home Bill

I certainly think that there is a risk. One of the risks could be reduced, depending on how the Government decide to distribute the money that is going to be made available. I think that it was the hon. Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) who asked whether the money was going to be distributed through the normal local government formula or on the basis of need. If the Government were to choose the number of older people in a particular local authority area as a good proxy for the level of need in that area and distribute the money on that basis, I suspect that they might find that there were far fewer problems. That having been said, we all know that eligibility criteria are different in different local authority areas and charging regimes are different in different local authority areas. The only local government funding that is not ring-fenced is funding for adult social services. That used to apply to all forms of social services funding, but the Children Act 2004 effectively took the children's money away and put it into a ring-fenced fund. A local authority can only make up its own mind how much of its money to spend when that money is for adult social care, which is why many authorities choose to spend it in different ways. Let me give a particularly bad example. When my local authority, Kent county council, decided that it needed to find several hundred thousand pounds to fund its own propaganda television channel, it increased charges for older people's care. It can raid the fund and get away with it because it is a Conservative council, and because the fund is not ring-fenced. Perhaps we should consider reforming that arrangement as part of our overall reform of adult social care. Having said all that, I should add that the Government have made it clear that the Bill represents only a first step towards the reform that we all seek—the first small part of the journey towards the creation of a National Care Service. Many questions remain to be answered, and we need to understand much more about the way in which the Bill will work once it has been implemented. However, to the extent that it delivers some urgent care for a desperately unhappy group of our constituents at this moment, and allows them to gain some relief while we deal with all these tortuous processes—