---

Personal Care at Home Bill

I wish that they were irrelevant. The purpose of the Bill, if I have read the Government right, is to be able to say during the election campaign, "We will deliver to you, from October 2010, these sophisticated services," but those sophisticated services will not exist in the volume that will be required. That is the unfairness implicit in that promise. Bed blocking will still be an issue, and the hon. Gentleman has taken me around in a circle back to where I needed to be. Many years ago, we spent endless hours in the Chamber talking about bed blocking. We were talking about it then because assessment processes were not in place. They are now better, and although I would not say that bed blocking is gone, we are not talking about it to the same extent. Also, we now realise that once an elderly person, or someone who is not very mobile, has been in a bed for 48 hours, they will need intensive rehabilitation to get them back into their home. Some of those services are available and are better than they were, but provision certainly is not as comprehensive as the Bill promises. It has, however, shown the need for expansion in the availability of those skills, and we have not addressed that problem.