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Personal Care at Home Bill

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) on his amendment, and not because I think that he is seriously suggesting that it should be included in the Bill—he has made it explicitly clear that that is not his intention. He intends to focus the Committee's attention on the large group of people who are defined out of, or excluded from, the category of beneficiaries of the Prime Minister's pledge; as I said in my intervention, these are the people who are excluded from benefiting from the pledge. Of course, across the House, we all acknowledge that this long-standing aspect of public policy has not been satisfactory. It was the former Prime Minister who, soon after the 1997 election, made it clear that payment for social care needed to be the subject of rigorous and profound examination. That is not the purpose of this amendment; it is an attempt to define clearly the large group of people who are excluded from benefiting from this Prime Minister's pledge, rather than focusing attention on the relatively small number who will benefit from it. The reason for focusing on the people who are excluded is to remind the Committee of the very much larger group of people who remain, as they have since 1997, suffering from a system of payment for social care that Members from across the House acknowledge to be inadequate.