My Lords, I was delighted to hear my noble friend Lord Ashley commend this important measure to your Lordships' House with all his customary facility and commitment. His speech alone justifies a Second Reading for the Bill.

Like my noble friend, I warmly congratulate my Honourable Friend Dr Hywel Francis on having piloted his Bill through the House of Commons with such skill and success. Speaking as a serial legislator in this policy area—both as a private Member and a Minister—I hold his achievement in high admiration. By all of my tests of the good MP, he is a parliamentarian of very considerable note.

Hywel has spoken, as has my noble friend, of the unfailing support of Carers UK and particularly of Emily Holzhausen at all stages of the Bill's progress so far. I know how deeply he appreciates also the extent both of all-party support for his Bill and that of Ministers and officials in departments of state all across Whitehall, more especially that of the Department of Health. The story is one of exemplary co-operation between Ministers, parliamentarians, officials and the voluntary sector to make life better for people whose work as carers in the community is reliably estimated to be saving the taxpayer £57 billion a year.

That striking figure is one on which those who always insist on the precise costing of help for carers should reflect. For the cost of the alternative of funding nursing and other institutional care is hugely more than that of giving carers in the community the right support at the right time and in the right place. And if failure to give that support leads to the carer's breakdown, the public funding of alternative care often becomes necessary not only for the person/s she or he is caring for, but also for the carer. That is what can and does result from a total preoccupation with cost and not net cost and knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing.

For me this is a deeply evocative occasion. It recalls the warmth of the all-party support I received, 35 years ago, after publishing my Private Member's Bill that became the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, which Carers UK described today as,

"landmark legislation of historic impact", and the RNIB as having,

"marked the beginning of a long revolution in the life chances of all disabled people and their carers".

It was not a personal achievement. A wide fellowship of parliamentarians worked with me to enact my Bill—notably Jack Ashley, as he then was, the late and much revered John Astor and my good and ever-resourceful friend Lewis Carter-Jones. The Hywel Francis Bill—"Sam's Bill", as it has been movingly described—is a lineal descendant of that legislation and eminently deserving of swift enactment as now drafted. I stress the word "swift" from long experience of the absolute necessity for supporters of Private Members' Bills to act with constant regard to the very strictly limited parliamentary time available to them.

The Carers (Equal Opportunities) Bill, like the 1970 Act, is about giving carers more choice and the opportunity to lead fuller and more fulfilling lives. It will ensure that assessment of their needs takes that goal wholly into account in relation to leisure, training and work opportunity and a more co-ordinated response from statutory authorities in meeting them. The Bill also recognises the crucial importance of making sure that carers are fully informed and updated on the help to which they are entitled.

Research points time and again to the importance of full and regularly updated information as a gateway to support. The experience of Carers UK, in promoting initiatives like Carers' Rights Day annually, is that carers are very often unaware of their rights and entitlements. There have been improvements in some areas, one recent study showing that carers were more likely to have adequate information if they had become carers in the last two years.

Yet as of now Carers UK alone receives 50,000 calls a year on its CarersLine for advice on benefits and rights. Again, Carers London—its London-based advocacy project—provides advice to over 2,000 carers every year, half of them from black and ethnic minority communities, where clearly the difficulties carers have in accessing information are even more serious than elsewhere.

Here I must declare an interest as Vice-President of the National Information Forum, whose work is now widely and rightly seen as one of the most valuable resources available to disability organisations. I pay warm tribute today to Ann Darnbrough and her colleagues at the forum for the crucially important leadership they perform. They deserve all the support everyone who can help to extend their work can give them.

I believe that the passing of this Bill will lead to carers being much better informed and a disturbing set of facts published by Macmillan Cancer Relief two days ago—which in terms of this debate could not have been more felicitously timed—strongly re-emphasises the importance of its urgent enactment.

The principal facts are that disability benefits went unclaimed by some 83,000 people terminally ill with cancer in the UK: 69,000 in England, 10,000 in Scotland, 3,000 in Wales and 900 in Northern Ireland. Their total loss in benefits was £126.5 million. Moreover, the financial problems of people with terminal cancer are now also being experienced by increasing numbers of people who are living with cancer, but not terminally ill. A cancer patient in Luton quoted by Macmillan says of her experience:

"I found claiming benefit more stressful than having cancer".

That deeply worrying comment should inform our approach to the urgency of the task of making this Bill law.

Clause 1 of the Bill, as my noble friend said, seeks to ensure that local authorities have strategies to improve information to carers about their rights. When a disabled person is being assessed, a local authority will have a duty to tell carers about their rights. That simple procedural change is most welcome, as is much else in this Bill.

I said at the outset that this was a deeply evocative occasion for me and there are two other reasons why. From its inception, I have been closely associated with Crossroads—Caring for Carers—which helps carers to take breaks from caring; and I know how committed the noble Lord, Lord Rix, is in that important policy area. I am a founder patron of Crossroads, an admirable charity, and when I became Minister for Disabled People in 1974 I approved a "pump-priming" grant over a three-year period to facilitate its expansion. This is the charity's 30th anniversary year and, looking back, I can think of no better investment I ever made as a Minister. Its work now extends nationwide and I am sure that all who work or have worked for Crossroads share my pleasure at the prospect of this Bill's early enactment. For its costs too will be a very wise investment.

I am today most vividly reminded also of the late Dame Flora Robson—a carers' champion if ever there was one—who came to see me within a month of my ministerial appointment. She came as chairman of the National Council for the Single Woman and her Dependants, whose pioneering work I know my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley, who worked in the 1970s for Manchester social services, will readily recall. I discussed with Flora the need for a carers' allowance, which happily I was able to legislate for the following year as the first-ever such allowance anywhere in the world.

Flora was a relentless campaigner for effective legislative protection for carers and she too would be rooting for this Bill if she were here today. So for her—and for all who led the way in the voluntary sector in improving the status and well-being of carers—I wish this humane Bill Godspeed.