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Dementia Services

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman—no doubt he will seek to catch Mr. Speaker's eye later, as that was a speech. Let me return to the intervention that he made at the beginning of it. He clearly needs to recognise that if anybody was making a party political point it was the Secretary of State, who intervened in the most tribal manner, as is fairly typical. The answers to the right hon. Gentleman's questions will, happily, become clear from what I am about to say. The NAO's report came on the back of a disappointingly vague Green Paper on social care and a personal care pledge by the Prime Minister that the Labour party's own Lord Lipsey has described as a "gimmick". Let me correct the claim in the Government's amendment that""the Personal Care at Home Bill will help some 400,000 people"." It is offering free care to only 270,000 people, of whom 160,000 already receive it free. It will take only 2,384 people out of care homes—the stated aim of the policy on the human rights grounds that are critical for its intra vires—from a population of more than 500,000. It will help less than 3 per cent. of social care users. In other words, the Government have not grasped the nettle: we have an ageing population on our hands, cases of dementia are on the rise and time is running out. By contrast, the Opposition have led the way in recognising that if a Government are to be serious about addressing the needs of dementia sufferers and older people across the country, reforming older people's care services across health and social care in a way that is both socially and fiscally responsible must be a priority. That was precisely the answer that I gave. To cover one of the points mentioned in the intervention by the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), which was rapidly developing into a speech, our policies on Alzheimer's research and pooled personal budgets, our proposals to reform the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence's drug assessments, our home protection scheme for affordable guaranteed residential care and our commitment to a reinvigorated public health agenda have forced the Government to pick up the pace of reform.