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Personal Care at Home Bill

Absolutely. I follow on from the Lord Lipsey quotation already given:""What has gone wrong is that in the middle of the consultation… the prime minister has declared that it is government policy for people with severe care needs in their own home to be paid in full"." I will come on to what we all think about that principle, but to try another analogy and to bring back the idea of homes, this is like trying in a consensual way to build a community of homes that will withstand the future, only to find that on one plot in the street there is a jerry-built shed which might well shelter some in a storm but which has not been made with the care and forethought that the whole project requires. Considering that we are looking for a White Paper in 2010 to follow the Green Paper that came this year, it is not enough simply to say that we need something rather than nothing—that something will do in the place of everything. We cannot hide the haste of a piece of legislation that, as ably noted earlier, has only two clauses and yet has been 12 years in the making. That is not the way I or many people outside this place would expect to go about such weighty matters as personal care at home—raising false expectations on the back of something that might turn out to be very poor quality. I shall return to that. Of course I join colleagues in welcoming the concept of personal care at home and, for many people, the concept of personal care at an affordable or zero price for those who need it. Nobody wants to be pushed out of their home; nobody wants to face high costs at particularly hard times and in emergency circumstances; nobody wants to be dependent on others or, indeed, on impersonal caring environments; nobody wants to lose any dignity; and nobody wants to be uncertain or to be the victim of a postcode lottery. However, we must be cautious in what we do from that position. I said in last week's debate, tangentially on the Green Paper but specifically on the continuation of the attendance allowance and the disability living allowance, that we must proceed with clarity on those issues, because we are dealing with a section of society that is often very vulnerable, but for the same reason we must go with caution. We rather randomly concluded in last week's debate that we should not approach the topic with heightened political emotions, but it is equally important to get it right. It is important not to get it wrong for the same reason as given last week—the size of the question ahead of us. There is still a demographic bomb ahead of us, so the scale of getting this wrong is important. As many Members have pointed out, the scale of the task is, frankly, unknown, but the scale of getting it wrong looms ever larger as an exponential problem ahead of us. I am afraid that putting one small piece of the jigsaw in place is simply not enough in this case because of that characteristic.