Care Bill [HL]

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, as so many noble Lords have said, making the points that I wanted to make, this is potentially a very important piece of legislation. I warmly welcome it. The well-being principle set out in Clause 1 is particularly welcome and the Government are to be congratulated on acting on so many of the Joint Committee's recommendations for strengthening the Bill. But unless this Bill is properly funded, its aspirational principle and welcome structure will just rub salt into the wound of the current crisis in social care. The Bill must be properly funded and other government departments must work in concert with this legislation if the social care crisis is to be alleviated.

The media debate around the Bill has largely focused on the care needs and the funding of that care for older people. I want to concentrate on the social care needs of working-age disabled people who comprise one-third of social care users. I will focus particularly on funding and housing.

Current government action on these two issues does not bode well. As we know, the fine aspiration set out in the well-being principle is cloaking a grim reality. This is particularly the case for the more than 20,000 most severely disabled people who, until it was closed to new applicants in 2010, were funded by the independent living fund to live ordinary lives in their own homes.

When I became disabled in the mid-60s, these were the people who, unless their families had sufficient money and suitable housing, were warehoused in residential care with no hope of living any sort of normal life. In the decades since, as we heard from my noble friend Lady Campbell, we have witnessed the liberation of this group to live fully integrated lives as part of the community. Some have been enabled to work and make considerable contributions to our society only because the ILF has provided top-up funding to the support available from local authorities.

But despite the fine words of Clause 1, these ILF users fear that current government action is threatening to return them to institutional care. ILF funding is ending and these people are being transferred to the local authority system in 2015. Their fears are not exaggerated and have been confirmed by the directors of social services, the Local Government Association and the Government's own impact assessment as well as the National Association of Financial Assessment Officers who have said that some councils will decide that residential care is a less expensive option than supporting people to live at home.

A few weeks ago, a group of ILF users took this decision to judicial review. It lost, but during the two-day hearing, it became clear that transition funding to protect current ILF users is available only for one year, 2015-16, and that neither the DWP nor the noble Earl’s own Department of Health want to take responsibility for making the case to the Treasury for further funding in the spending review.

What steps will the Department of Health and the DWP jointly take to ensure that funding is available after 2015? Will the Minister assure the House that ILF users will not be forced into residential care or confined within their own home with only ‘life and limb’ care following the transfer of funding responsibilities to local authorities? If this Care Bill is to fulfil its principle of well-being, what level of funding do the Government believe is necessary to ensure that we do not return to the days when disabled people with high support needs had no opportunity to live independently? If there is no time to answer at the end of the debate, would the Minister be so kind as to write to me?

The justified fears of ILF users serve only to highlight the current crisis in adult social care which is failing to support disabled people to do the basic things in life—basic needs such as washing, dressing and getting out of the house. I will not repeat the points that other noble Lords made so eloquently. However, as the Care and Support Alliance has emphasised, this Care Bill will fail to improve the social care system for disabled people if the welcome proposal of a national eligibility threshold is set too high. The White Paper's suggested threshold of “substantial” is too high. For the ambitions of Clause 1 of the Bill to be realised—that social care should enable participation in work, education and society—it is essential that the eligibility threshold should support that ambition, not demolish it.

It is vital that the national threshold is set at no more than “moderate” to ensure that prevention is at the heart of the social care system. Prevention must lie at the heart of this Bill. It will also depend on other government departments and other local authority services playing their full parts to ensure that social care expenditure does not escalate in an unintended way.

One of the most important factors in prevention is housing; both the provision of suitable housing and the aids and adaptation service. Countless stories of people being unable to return to their own homes after serious illness or accident because of inaccessibility are heartbreaking. They also result in costs occurring elsewhere in the system because of delayed discharge from hospital or expensive residential care. Simple adaptations to a person’s home can prevent the need for costly care, whether it is the provision of ramps and handrails, lever taps or a downstairs bathroom when stairs become insuperable.

This applies equally to the need for supported housing especially for people with learning disabilities. Frequently, local authorities do not even seem aware of their legal responsibility to house this group. I congratulate the Government on having listened to the Joint Committee on the draft Bill and including the suitability of a person’s home in the definition of well-being in Clause 1. During the passage of this legislation, I will seek to ensure that housing also appears on the face of the Bill in other relevant clauses so that it cannot be forgotten.

Finally, it seems like a forlorn hope that the Chancellor will recognise the urgent need to build the thousands of homes needed for social housing. They are particularly needed by disabled people who are more dependent on social housing than the rest of the population. Instead, the Chancellor spends our scarce resources on his help-to-buy scheme, which can only lead to yet another catastrophic housing bubble.

I wish the noble Earl the eloquence of angels in persuading his fellow government Ministers that they must all play their part if this Bill is going to result in more than just fine words and aspirations, particularly the Chancellor of the Exchequer.