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Personal Care at Home Bill

I listened closely to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire—I was having a cheese sandwich at the time, but I like to follow these things from near or far—and what he actually said was that an insurance model might well incentivise insurance companies to enable people to stay in their homes. That is far from the parody that the Minister paints. The insurance model that the Government identified as a possibility in the Green Paper could well be constructed to incentivise insurance companies to bring about exactly that outcome. I do not take such a limited view of the options the Government described in the Green Paper as the Minister has come to. He has done so rather hurriedly, given that it was published only recently. It is clear that the No. 1 priority identified in the Green Paper is that we need more joined-up working. That has been touched on by contributors on both sides of the Chamber. The Green Paper states:""We need services that will keep people independent and well for longer...through better joined-up working between health, housing and social care services and between social care and the disability benefits system."" As you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I have a long-standing interest in disability issues, and I wonder about the proposal that disability benefits should be redirected to local authorities to provide care. I wonder whether we are thus caught on the horns of a dilemma, on one hand trying to provide more personalised care and on the other depersonalising the benefits system. Joined-up working necessitates proper discussion with local government and a proper assessment of how it will do the job that the Bill gives it. The Green Paper mentions services""fully joined up between the NHS and the new National Care Service."" However, I have heard nothing this evening to reassure me about the information provided by the health service to care services, or about the role of third-party organisations such as Headway, which helps many brain-injured people and with which I have been involved for many years. It allows people with acquired brain injury, often suffering from serious disability, to stay in their own homes. They are frequently younger people, whom we should not exclude from our considerations tonight.