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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I support the amendments, first, because I totally agree with them. The second reason takes me back in history—I think it was 1976 or 1978—to when the Government had a Bill proposing that learning disability clients should be taken out of mental handicap hospitals and placed in the community. I had the privilege and lovely responsibility —this is when old age comes into experience—of managing that project. I worked with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, who was then director of social services. I also worked with Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark and all the London boroughs, which were absolutely against having patients transferred to the community. If there is something in the Bill and it is government policy, everybody will work towards it and understand that there must be integration. We have mentioned the word ““culture””. I found this issue absolutely fundamental. It runs through the whole issue. The noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, was also part of this exercise. She was in Brighton at the time and some clients went to Brighton. It was extremely difficult to get local authorities to understand the needs of some of these clients. Some had special needs and difficult behavioural problems. However, we got there because we had target dates by which we had to do it and also because we had trained staff. We have not yet spoken about the workforce, except in terms of carers and social care. We need to have a workforce that will be able to supply the level and standards of care that will be required. My noble friend Lady Greengross has just mentioned the fact that dementia care in hospitals is not good. That is probably very true, although it is good in some places. We must look at training needs for social care as well as for transferring patients to secondary care. The culture issues are important and once they are included in the Bill, one can get to work on them.