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Personal Care at Home Bill

I begin a brief speech by congratulating the Minister on the way that he dealt with the Bill. He put the best gloss possible on it, as I have not the slightest doubt that the Bill was generated in No. 10 Downing street and imposed on his Department against its advice. I have been there, so I congratulate him on presenting a defence of what is, in policy terms, an indefensible measure. I shall go through the three key arguments, which are in many ways similar to those set out by the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), to which I do not believe the Minister responded adequately during the debate, despite his polished performance. The first is the argument about the convention on human rights. The policy justification that the Government have offered for the Bill does not stack up as a defence against the concern that they made explicit in the explanatory memorandum to the Bill. There remains a set of unanswered questions about the Bill. My second set of concerns relate to the policy implications of the introduction of the group of people who will benefit from free social care. The Minister rightly said in his presentation that we should not let the best be the enemy of the good, that we must allow for incremental change and so on. I entirely agree with him about that, but it does not absolve the Government from the need to think about the policy implications of what they do today when projected forward to tomorrow. Last July the Government said clearly that we could not afford a solution on personal care that landed the cost on the taxpayer. That is in the Green Paper in a rather convoluted form, and the Minister confirmed today that that remains the Government's view, yet as a consequence of the Bill, a group of people is created in the middle of the social care requirement for whom that outcome is what the Government are now seeking to legislate—tax-funded free social care—not, as the Minister said several times in loose wording, for the most vulnerable, but for the second most vulnerable group. The most vulnerable are those with critical care needs, who need residential care. Those are still subject to means-testing under the Government's intended solution. Below them in the hierarchy of need is the group that has been identified by the Prime Minister as the people who should benefit from free social care. Then there is the whole of the rest of the social care group. It is a golden rule of policy that if a group of people is created in the middle of a much larger group, all of whom benefit from broadly the same type of care with constantly changing requirements, the result is a change in behaviour. What the Government have done is create a group of people—a very small group, when seen in the context of all those who benefit from social care—to whom they have offered the promise of free social care, which is precisely the policy solution that the Government, quite rightly in my view, ruled out in their Green Paper. By doing that, if the Bill reaches the statute book and is actioned next October, they will have created a huge policy problem for the evolution of social care policy in a way that is consistent with the principles rightly set out in the Green Paper last summer.