Committee (8th Day)

Part of Care Bill [HL] – in the House of Lords at 4:30 pm on 29 July 2013.

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Photo of Lord Warner Lord Warner Labour 4:30, 29 July 2013

My Lords, I briefly intervene from the perspective of a member of the Joint Select Committee, which proposed that there should be some kind of body. Much of our thinking was focused on the early days of these new arrangements. We thought it highly unlikely that there would not be a lot of disputes in the first few years of what would be a pretty major change to the arrangements. There are two sources of potential dispute—those by people who do not like the results of an assessment made about them, in some form or another, and some of the stuff that comes out of making markets. There is the issue of the rate for the job between local authorities and providers. We could see some of those areas also leading to disputes.

We had it in mind that some mechanism should at least be ready to go into action should this happen. It may be that, in the longer term, things will settle down and there will not be a great problem. However, even if the Minister is not prepared to accept my noble friend’s amendment and make statutory provision, the world would be reassured if the Government at least had a plan B so that we do not end up with judicial review if things do not go well. Rather, we end up with some kind of arbitration system which is low cost, speedy and can deal with some of the inevitable teething problems of a fairly major change to these systems.