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Personal Care at Home Bill

I am pleased to be taking the Bill through its Committee stage on the Floor of the House. In addressing the amendments, I should like to place my remarks in a slightly wider context. The hon. Member for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland) said that the Bill was very small, but I can tell him that it will have a very big impact. As the Minister of State with responsibility for care services, I am hugely proud to take the Bill through its Committee stage and Third Reading this evening. The Bill will provide support and relief to some 400,000 older people with the greatest personal care needs in their own home—people with advancing conditions such as Parkinson's, dementia and motor neurone disease—and 280,000 people who require high levels of intimate personal care on a day-to-day basis at home will now get those services free. As has been remarked, many of those people have faced the burden of paying large amounts of their own money—they do not lose their own homes; my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) rightly corrected the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) on that—for care as their conditions deteriorate. The Bill will remove that millstone.