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Personal Care at Home Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. Perhaps it is timely that the Secretary of State has returned to the Chamber, because he might be able to clarify the exact cost to the Exchequer of this Bill—not just the up-front costs, but, as my hon. Friend suggests, the funding requirement for the extra staff who will be required to implement what is proposed here. That is not clear at all. The next big document that the Government produced—a number of years later, in July 2009—was the Green Paper entitled "Shaping the Future of Care Together". Having digested that document, I have to say that there are many interesting ideas in it. It puts together a wide array of issues, and a number of pieces of the jigsaw are there. However, the Government have chosen to take just one piece of that jigsaw and promote it today, completely missing the wider context of what else is happening in care. That Green Paper, which I hope the Secretary of State might be willing to look back at, points out that the current system is based on legacy and calls for bold reform, such as that which created the NHS. By changing things in incremental steps and limiting the objectives, things will begin to overlap and we will end up with a confusing structure. Rather than heeding the advice of the Green Paper, we are ignoring it and just coming out with another little building block to add to the confusing layers that we already have. The scale of the problem is evident. We are all living longer. It is estimated that, by 2026, 1.7 million adults will expect care in one form or another. One in two men will expect some form of care as they get older, and two in three women will have high care needs. The problem will not go away. The type of care available will also become more complex, as advances in science are made. People's expectations will increase, yet what we have today is confusion over funding. Wide variations of care are offered, with standards differing from council to council across the country. That is another example of the postcode lottery, but I do not see how the Bill will challenge that. Money is not always appropriately spent. As I mentioned earlier, so much more effort could be invested in prevention, rather than in a cure. The current system is effectively a means-tested structure, so savings are used to pay for care. As has been reiterated time and again, we now see a requirement for people to sell their property in order to pay for the care that they will need. That is scandalous. Labour's big idea was the creation of the National Care Service, which was to be""a universal and sustainable system which empowers people to live their lives the way they want to"," providing access and support to people regardless of location; an easily understood system with agreed levels of assessments across the country, based on personal circumstances and recognising individuals' ability to pay, and all fully co-ordinated with the NHS and, of course, fair and affordable. That is a bold statement. That is radical. That is what we should be working towards in this Bill.