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Personal Care at Home Bill

I am rather sad to hear the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) saying that this is a probing amendment, because I am quite attracted to the idea of removing discretion from local authorities in this matter. I also have a certain sympathy with the Liberal Democrats' new clause. If we are going to create a national care service, we shall have to create a common way of assessing people's needs and a common set of criteria against which to assess them, as was made clear in the Green Paper. One aspect of this that none of the Front Benchers has tackled—the elephant in the room, perhaps—is that we will get genuine portability only if there is agreement on a standard level of funding. In other words, someone's condition would need to be assessed in the same way wherever they were, and they would then need to be funded at the same level wherever they were. That would take an awful lot of discretion away from local authorities. This is going to be a difficult matter to tackle, but it must be tackled when we come to the White Paper. Although I do not believe that it is appropriate to address these matters in the Bill, I would like to hear my hon. Friend the Minister say that he understands that we are going to have to work to resolve them. I would like to suggest to him that, as well as having standard assessment criteria for people wherever they live, we might take the step, which I suggested on Second Reading, of making it compulsory for social care to be delivered from an adult care trust, in which the local authority and the local NHS are made to pool their resources and work together to deliver that level of care. That would go a long way towards resolving the tension between localism and the need to have a standard package of care everywhere. It would also help to bring NHS resources into focus in regard to delivering this care.