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Personal Care at Home Bill

It is difficult for me to comprehend that anyone would want to read a newspaper during this immensely penetrating and exciting oration, but self-delusion is a feature of politics, I suppose. The displacement effect of the Bill is likely to be serious. The House deserves a better explanation of what the Government have modelled in those terms. We heard earlier, rather alarmingly, that the consultation on the proposed legislation has been, at best, slight. None the less, it is inconceivable that the Department will not have modelled some of the effects on local authorities. I hope that when the Minister sums up, we hear more about that modelling. There is a displacement effect in other respects. Other services that are provided to people in order to deliver the quality of care to which my hon. Friend referred may be at risk, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) highlighted. Equally limited is the estimate of the catalyst effect of the Bill. When I come to the main part of my speech, I shall speak about the home and care in considerably more detail, but in these preliminary remarks, I urge the Government to provide, perhaps in the summing up, greater clarity about what the catalyst effect might be. It is surely inconceivable that people will not reorder their affairs to take advantage of the extra care. That is not in any sense a criticism. I guess it is what many of us might do in similar circumstances, but again, there is a singular absence of information about that—no obvious estimate, no modelling available to the House. I entirely endorse the sentiment expressed from those on the Opposition Front Bench that these matters need to be explored in considerable detail in Committee, which is why the programme motion is disappointing, to say the least. The only modelling that we have is in the explanatory notes, but the calculations there—the estimates of the number of people in the main beneficiary groups and the table that forms part of that—seem to be imperfect. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire mentioned the mathematical imperfections. Given the displacement that I described and the incentive effect that I mentioned, perhaps the table ought to be recalculated. I hope that a pledge might come from Ministers to examine those matters more closely in the light of the contributions of various hon. Members on both sides of the House.