Guarantee Credit
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
9:30 am
Professor Steve Webb (Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise the issue of bed blocking, which is entirely germane to the point, as I shall explain in a moment. I am not sure that the position of people in residential care is different, because their treatment under the pension credit will be complex. However, bed blocking matters, because the people with whom we are dealing are long-stay hospital in-patients. In a sense, they are, potentially, victims twice. Not only are they in hospital when they would like to get out—they are ready to do so, but the social care is not available—but, under clause 2(6), they will also have some of their money taken from them. People face a sort of double jeopardy. Once again, the phrase ''bed blocking'' had not been invented in 1948, but it is now part of the lexicon of everyday language.
The matter involves issues of principle that relate to hospital downrating and apply especially to contributory benefits, and issues that relate to the Government's failure to extend the concession to care benefits, with which we should deal elsewhere. Means-tested benefits are designed to top-up people to a certain standard of living and ensure that they can maintain that standard of living. The matter involves arguments about double provision. I hope that the Minister will give us evidence of research that the Department has commissioned to measure the extent of that double provision and that suggests that there is a basis for the tendency to downrate.
Having spoken informally to Ministers elsewhere about why the Government did not go the whole hog and scrap hospital downrating, my impression was that it was not so much the people left—the victims of hospital downrating—who were the worry. It involves a thin-end-of-the-wedge argument. It was not the 6,000 people, or whatever the figure involved is, but the fact that, once we allow the principle of not downrating hospital in-patients, we have opened a Pandora's box. What other things are the Government worried about in accepting the principle? What other expenditure do they fear that they might incur? Where else in government might the principle be applied about which they are worried? Ministers have implied informally elsewhere that the reason is not so much those 6,000 but where it might lead. I hope that the Minister will fill us in on the empirical evidence on cost-saving and on the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument.