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Personal Care at Home Bill

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman has been listening—well, he has obviously been listening, but I hope that he heard my saying that this was a probing amendment, so the Committee will not have the opportunity to endorse it. As I said, it is deliberately intended to probe the Government's intentions on who should be included, as well as who should be excluded, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) said. With great respect to the doubtless very thorough briefing prepared by Labour's backroom people, it would be helpful—particularly given that all the questions relate to the same issue—if it were recognised that tabling a probing amendment does not necessarily invite Members to pass it. The amendment was tabled as a probing amendment and it was designed to elucidate information from the Government. That is precisely the official Opposition's job. I have already mentioned that the real debate on the issue will take place when we reach the amendment dealing with transitional arrangements, so I am keen not to get deflected by being forced to answer a question that really requires an answer from the Government. It is thus for me to ask the Minister whether he is happy with the drafting of provisions intended to cut out residents of care homes altogether. Are there no grey areas or any difficult marginal issues? Is the Bill drafted in such a way and is the money resolution so tightly drafted as to make it explicit that people who have done the right thing could none the less be automatically excluded because they own their own homes? Is the Minister happy to put this issue on the backburner, since the Bill has thwarted the Green Paper's aim? The Minister has asserted outside the House that all this is consonant with the Green Paper process. On the contrary, it has thrown a spanner in the works of the process of examining social care as a whole. That means taking account of those who own their homes as well as those who do not, and those who have assets as well as those who have none. It means taking account of very different levels of care need, and of problems relating to the interrelationship between health and social care. Many Members have reflected their constituents' concerns in referring to efforts to persuade the NHS and social care providers to be a little more flexible at the margins in order to prevent the terrible difficulties that people experience in trying to gain access to appropriate care and support. I wonder why the Minister could not at least consider—we invited him to do so on a number of occasions—presenting this Bill in tandem with a measure similar to our home protection scheme. It would have been fine for him to claim authorship for it if he had wished. That would have dealt with the difficulties confronted both by homes and by those receiving care in them, as well as by those receiving care in a different setting. Is the Minister satisfied that what I hope he will accept is the somewhat clunky drafting of subsection (2) is strong enough to prevent a legal challenge? On Second Reading, we drew attention to the dangerous impact that the subsection could have on residential care supply. If people are given an incentive to invest in extra care at the expense of residential care, that could distort provision. There is also another issue of more immediate concern. I shall exaggerate it for the sake of the argument, but I hope the Minister will accept what I say in the spirit in which it is meant. The whole point of scrutinising legislation is to ensure that a Minister has no defence if he subsequently says that the consequences of that legislation were unintended. If at this point I describe the problems and mischief that the drafting allows, and if those problems and mischief indeed come to pass, it will be wholly legitimate for me to say, "No, Minister, I warned you, and it was therefore entirely intended for this to go wrong", and the Minister will have no defence. When a care home owner wakes up on the day that the Bill is passed and seeks to outsource provision to a company that he or she wholly owns, will it still constitute care and accommodation provided by "one establishment"? What, in fact, is the legal definition of "establishment"? Can the Minister confirm the possibility of a loophole in the legislation? He has confirmed to me in a written answer that""It is open to any residential care home to reshape their service".—[Official Report, 8 December 2009; Vol. 502, c. 281W.]" Will he also tell us the potential cost of the exploitation of such a loophole to the taxpayer? What if 100 per cent. of those in care homes with critical care needs became eligible for free personal care? I would have hoped that if the Minister could not answer that question now he might write to me, but he has already said that he is not prepared even to do that. The legislation was drafted in haste on the basis of a back-of-the-envelope impact assessment. The Minister has already confessed in writing that that impact assessment was wrong and needs to be corrected. It consists almost entirely of estimates. Given the mess that the Labour party has made of our public finances, it is more important than ever for the Committee to be informed of the potential liabilities of the taxpayer should there be loopholes in the Bill.