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Personal Care at Home Bill

This is slightly depressing. The Government have chosen to discuss what they regard as a prime ministerial flagship Bill for only one day on the Floor of the House. The Bill was put together at short notice and flies in the face of the processes that the Government had already set up through a Green Paper. All sorts of people outside this place, including those who give a lot of their time to caring for vulnerable people and the many people in the various categories of need, have grave concerns about it. There is a big question mark about the legitimacy of the legislation. We have properly asked questions about its compliance with the European convention on human rights and my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) rightly identified and reinforced those discrimination issues in his argument. However, after all that, we end up with the Minister somewhat charmlessly deciding that it is really rather an insult to subject the legislation that he is meant to be defending to scrutiny. Of course, the only way in which one can do that is by way of amendment—I dare say that that would be clear in the minds of most hon. Members. The fact that the Bill has been rushed out and is contrary to the run of the Green Paper means that many questions have to be asked. In my introduction I simply proposed my amendment 42 and said how it is framed, so it hardly warranted the Minister's quite extraordinary rant. It is framed so as to allow the Committee an opportunity to test whether it feels that the process by which the Bill has come about, the time in which the consultation will take place—it will not finish until February—and the results of the assessment of that consultation, which will be important for so many people representing various stakeholder and constituency interests, have been sufficiently thought through and well framed for us to produce good legislation, which we can pass from this House to the other place to look at. We have set up a number of things that I hope those in the other place will find useful, as hooks for their discussions, so that their expertise can be brought to bear. I hope that the record will show that, far from not being supporters of the Bill, we are indeed supporters of the Bill. We are also keen to ensure that it works for the purposes that it is intended to work and for the people for whom it is meant to work. That is why we have done what we had to do in this Committee stage. That is precisely why we are all sent here: to do our legislative duty. I am surprised that the Minister found that insulting and felt that it warranted his outrageous rant, which I thought was undignified and not worthy of the office that he is privileged to hold. Therefore it is vital that we give the Government and the Secretary of State a chance to pause for thought. Has this Bill been sufficiently well framed, in its timing and for the process by which we are drawn to this place to scrutinise legislation? Is it sufficient for a Government simply to say, "We want it to happen; therefore it will happen"? Or, at this late stage in this Parliament, should we be doing our duty, by looking at the constituency that the Bill is meant to represent? The Minister has not given an adequate answer to why 2,000 people becoming net beneficiaries is a sufficient benefit, as opposed to the costs, to warrant the £500 million being pledged, not least because money is to be scraped from savings by local authorities—local authorities are meant to be serious providers; they are also meant to have the opportunity to save—from budgets that are often already pared down to the bone. It behoves us to give the Committee an opportunity to express its opinion. Had the Minister chosen to take a slightly different route in responding to this debate, we might have been more amenable to building a consensual approach, but that does not seem to be on offer. The Committee should have the opportunity to register its distaste at how the Government have sought to treat us in dealing with the amendment and at the Minister's response. I therefore seek to press the amendment to a vote. Question put, That the amendment be made. The Committee divided: Ayes 188, Noes 286.