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Personal Care at Home Bill

I notice that the Minister freely acknowledges that. It is important that the views of organisations such as Headway be taken into account. Mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that the support given to people in Headway houses, which provide support for carers as well as the young people affected, is properly accounted for in the Bill. I hope the Minister will say something about that area of policy. The Green Paper also states that the benefits of a joined-up service are that""people receive more appropriate care in the right setting, reducing costs, improving outcomes and ensuring that services work together to keep people healthy and active wherever possible."" I am not convinced that the Bill will ensure any of that. Its single substantial change will be made out of context and out of place and is born of short-term, limited and arguably political ambitions. As the King's Fund has warned, the Bill makes the Green Paper's proposals "incoherent". Age Concern and Help the Aged have spoken of the need for""fundamental reform of the entire care system"." I and the Opposition Front Benchers anticipated the need for such a root-and-branch reform as a result of the Green Paper and the discussions it provoked. The Learning Disability Coalition has argued that the Bill contains "perverse incentives" that will prevent people from taking advantage of the most appropriate care. Surely we need an holistic approach, as my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State said, with an emphasis on more preventive care to ensure that more people stay in their own homes. That means that we must be sceptical about any plans for cuts in disability living allowance and attendance allowance, or any redirection of allowances into the care system that takes place without proper discussion and consultation with representative organisations. I invite the Minister to answer one or two further questions. Will he clarify the marriage between the care budget and the various allowances that will feed the process financially? Will he say something about the estimates he has made of the displacement effect on local government? Will he draw a clearer picture of the effect on wider services that my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham mentioned? My hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury, the shadow Minister, in summing up, will add to and amplify those questions, and he will of course have cleverer ones of his own, but speaking with an appropriate degree of humility on a subject of which my only knowledge is derived from representing the interests of my most vulnerable constituents, I ask the Minister, at least as a starting point, to deal with those fairly fundamental doubts. T.S. Eliot wrote:""Home is where one starts from"," and as I have said, it is also where we frequently return to for care and support. The objective of facilitating more personal care at home is one that will be widely shared across the House, but it requires far greater consideration, and more careful reflection and proper planning, than is suggested by the Bill. To work, the measure must work well, and to do that, it must be carefully conceived and properly considered. We owe those who will be most affected by the Bill nothing less than that.