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Personal Care at Home Bill

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right, because of course the cost of even this limited pledge is significant in public expenditure terms and the Government have made it crystal clear that no additional money will be provided to local authorities to allow them to meet the additional burdens that this pledge imposes on them. Thus, it must be assumed that somebody, somewhere else, who benefits from local government expenditure—as he says, it is likely to be other people who benefit from social service expenditure—will pay for this pledge from the Prime Minister. As a result of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury, I wish to focus on the implications of creating this distinction between the small group of people who will benefit because they receive "personal care at home" and the much larger group who will still have to pay for personal care under the old rules. What are the implications of creating that new distinction? I suggest that there are three such implications on which the Committee should focus. The first is the short-term implication. A group of people who change their care arrangements according to their requirements will suddenly find themselves taking decisions based on a major cost implication that ought to be taken based on their care need. There will be two categories: those who are at home, who get all their personal care free; and those who are defined as out of the "at home" category, who will still have to pay for their personal care according to the old rules. It therefore matters hugely who is "at home" and who is not "at home", and the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury is an attempt to define precisely who is not "at home". The former Minister, the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman), reacted to my hon. Friend's amendment by saying, "Oh, these people who receive extra care ought to benefit from the pledge." Perhaps they ought to benefit from the pledge, but if they do, the cost will go up immeasurably from the £500-odd million that the Government say that it will already cost. My hon. Friend is drawing attention to the fact that the much larger group of people who do not receive personal care "at home" will be the losers from this prime ministerial election pledge. That is the first implication: where there is currently a logical development of care provision, in future there will be two categories and an anomaly created by the move from one category to the other. That is the first and immediate consequence. The second consequence, which is, in my view, much more malign, is that if this policy were to endure for any length of time, people would change their behaviour in order to ensure that they fell on the right side of the line to benefit from the pledge rather than on the wrong side of it. Let me pose a few questions to the House. If personal care at home is free, but personal care delivered not at home is not free, is somebody allowed to move their home in order to ensure that their personal arrangements move from one side of the line to the other? Members of this House have learned over the past 12 months the dangers of moving their house from one place to another in order to qualify under rules under which one did not previously qualify. If we create a group of people for whom personal care is free and say that it is available only to those who are at home, we should not be surprised if people who receive personal care and do not qualify immediately change their arrangements in order to ensure that they qualify. The definition of what constitutes "at home"—of who is included and who is excluded—will be the subject of constant challenge as people change their arrangements to ensure that they qualify, although they originally did not. I was reading the definition that the Government have offered of people who are excluded from the benefit of the pledge. Let me repeat it to the House. People are excluded if there is""the provision of personal care to a person living in accommodation that an establishment provides to the person together with the care"." If I provide accommodation and personal care to my parents in my grannexe, will that be included or excluded? Is a grannexe where I or my family provide personal care to my elderly relative included or excluded? Is my grannexe an "establishment" according to the definition in this statute? It is unclear to me.