Clause 1 — Free provision of personal care at home

Part of Bill Presented — Sustainable Energy (Local Action) bill – in the House of Commons at 6:45 pm on 12 January 2010.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Phil Hope Phil Hope Minister of State (the East Midlands), Regional Affairs, Minister of State (the East Midlands), Department of Health 6:45, 12 January 2010

Amendment 15 would effectively exclude local authorities from the duty to provide free personal care to people living at home on the ground of a lack of central funds. That cannot be acceptable. Local authorities have a duty to meet the eligible needs of their clients. They may take their available funds into account when deciding the level of resources allocated to social care for adults, but they may not refuse to meet a person's eligible needs on financial grounds.

It is true that, currently, councils may charge for non-residential services. When doing so, they should employ a means test to help them determine the charges to be recovered. However, it is right that the provision of personal care to those with the highest needs living at home, which will enable them to continue living at home, should be exempt from such charges. It is also right that local councils play their part in the provision of personal care to those living at home with very high needs as a way of supporting their local communities. I hope that alongside the measures in the Bill, councils continue to develop their universally available preventive services for those in their local communities. Such services offer local authorities the chance to invest in prevention and reablement now to prevent higher care costs in future.

I draw Members' attention to "Use of Resources in Adult Social Care", a comprehensive assessment of the ways that local councils make best use of those resources, which the Department published in October 2009. It enables a comparison between councils on their performance regarding how they go about using their resources. Councils can look at a number of examples of excellent practice, and find ways to deliver higher quality services at a lower cost. I highly recommend the document. Indeed, hon. Members might want to sit down and discuss it with their local authorities to ensure that the best practice we see in certain parts of the country is repeated in others, and indeed across the whole country.

An integral part of the Bill is the proposed offer of reablement. That is a package of intensive support measures to help somebody to become more independent and to continue to live in their own home. As the document to which I referred and others tell us, the development of reablement services is already under way in many areas. We are providing some £420 million of funding in the first year of implementation, to help councils both expand that best practice and meet the costs of providing free personal care to those who are eligible.

I should like to place on record my rebuttal of the work of fiction on Department of Health research funding that Mr. O'Brien repeated at the Dispatch Box a moment or two ago. Let me assure him and the Committee that cancer and dementia funding will not be affected in the way he described. We are providing more funding than ever for health research-a £1 billion budget is ring-fenced for research. We are committed to this: we are not cutting funding for cancer research to fund free personal care, as we have made clear. Indeed, our research budget has doubled since 1997.

Our social care proposals will be funded in part by making efficiency savings on Department budgets that are outside the ring-fenced NHS research and development budget. Those efficiencies will therefore not affect vital front-line projects in areas such as cancer and dementia. The research budget that funds the National Institute for Health Research and the Department's policy research programme will increase to more than £1 billion in 2010-2011. I hope I have put our position clearly on the record.

Amendment 48 would allow the Secretary of State to make regulations to put a cap on the amount of personal care that local authorities may be required to provide to people living at home. Although local authorities can use cost ceilings as a guide when deciding on the best and most cost effective way to meet a person's care needs, they have a duty to meet those needs regardless of costs, and they cannot use such cost ceilings rigidly. As such, the amendment would be inappropriate-it would enable the Secretary of State to make regulations that would impose a blanket requirement on local authorities to restrict their provision of vital personal care services to people living at home to a particular amount, which could result in unmet needs.

Let me be clear on the accusations about the impact assessment and the robustness of our figures. We have not underestimated any hourly rates for buying the care: we are using the figure of £15.75 per hour at 2011-12 prices, which is well within the expected costs. In addition, we have not underestimated the number of hours of care needed, as some have alleged: we have used the average number of hours based on Personal Social Services Research Unit modelling for people with highest needs-that is to fund the personal care element of an individual, not all the services for those who meet the criteria. We are now consulting on three possible approaches to a distribution formula, which will make allocations as fair as possible. Some authorities might have higher costs, but others, where there are fewer people, will fund their own care locally. We propose to review the workings and the costings of the scheme within the first 18 to 24 months.

I know that things have been said by other organisations and I am pleased to have had the opportunity to put on the record here in the Chamber our view that our costings and funding assessments are robust. I therefore ask the hon. Member for Eddisbury to withdraw the amendment.