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Personal Care at Home Bill

I can probably find common cause with the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) in certain respects. I understand his desire to probe the Government and secure greater clarity. As was observed by the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell), a former Secretary of State, it is plain that at some point the Government will have to go further. I see no moral justification for excluding a group of people with fairly serious care needs from Government help, whether they are in their own homes or in residential accommodation. At some point in the near future, we will require a personal care not at home Bill to address that need. I might part company from the hon. Member for Eddisbury on this point: he and his party have proposed the idea of a home protection system, under which, for a fee, the totality of a person's residential costs will be met. I believe that that would create a strange precedent, because for the first time an individual in this country would not be responsible for providing their own board and lodging. It has always been a principle that we are all responsible for providing our own board and lodging. Even if we have to pay for it out of benefits, that is still taken into account. The Opposition's solution to the problem would go against that principle. In probing the matter before us, the hon. Gentleman has set running some hares that perhaps need not be set running. I am particularly concerned about the fact that he is attempting to exclude extra care housing, because I believe that it is a model for the provision of care for older people in the future. Indeed, the huge majority of older people tell us they would aspire to such an arrangement were they to develop a care need because it means that they could live in their own accommodation. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the Department of Health website, he will find a clear definition of extra care housing, not least in the guidance for a competition in which developers were invited to bid for an £80 million fund to build extra care accommodation. One of the key elements of the definition is that the individual lives in their own home. They might have bought their extra care accommodation or be living in it as a tenant, but they will have security of tenure; they will have self-contained facilities so that they can cook and have access to their own bathroom and sanitary facilities; they will have their own front door which they can close to the world if they so wish, and they will be able to arrange their care needs themselves. The current system of means-testing people has the added advantage that, given that the accommodation will be the person's own home, the value of that home cannot be taken into account in the means test. The person might be looking to protect some of their savings, and that is a good way of preserving equity and passing it on to children—that might be important to them. I believe passionately, therefore, that extra care housing is a model that we need to promote. I believe that the Government have accepted that, and until we started debating the Personal Care at Home Bill and amendments to it, I always thought that the Opposition wanted to promote it as well. However, in the light of Second Reading and—on the face of it—amendment 9, I am now seriously worried about whether they understand the nature of extra care housing and its importance in the future.