To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the margin for error in their estimate in the impact assessment on the Personal Care at Home Bill of about 110,000 younger adults being eligible for free personal home care.

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the margin for error in their estimate in the impact assessment on the Personal Care at Home Bill of the cost of re-ablement services being £130 million a year.

The estimate of 110,000 younger adults eligible for free personal care at home is based principally on the referrals, assessments and packages of care (RAP) data from councils for 2007-08¹.

Fair Access to Care Services (FACS) guidance on eligibility for local authorities, a copy of which has already been placed in the Library, establishes four levels of eligibility for services. These are critical, substantial, moderate and low, with critical representing the highest level of social care need.

The RAP data shows 82,000 younger users of local authority home care and 35,000 younger users of direct payments on 31 March 2008-out of 395,000 younger recipients of community-based services. It is not known what proportion of the 117,000 who receive personal care are in the critical need group, but it is expected that they would be the majority.

Therefore, for the purposes of the impact assessment, it is assumed that there could be some 100,000 younger adult local authority-funded users receiving personal care in the critical category. It is likely that most of them receive their care free, as their incomes are generally low. It has therefore been assumed that 90 per cent already receive free personal care at home and that 10 per cent make a means-tested contribution towards the cost.

Little is known about the number of younger adults who currently fund their own care at home. It has been assumed that approximately a further 10,000 younger adults may be brought under state funding following the introduction of the Personal Care at Home Bill.

No specific estimate of a margin of error has been made. However, the figures have been rounded to the nearest 10,000 to reflect the uncertainty. The figure of 110,000 should therefore be treated as an estimate.

The estimated cost of extending reablement services is based on an assumed cost per person of £1,000. This is an average cost and acknowledges that the actual cost of individually tailored packages will lie within a range depending on the length of time and specialist services required.

The anticipated benefits of reablement-ie, helping individuals to live independently at home for longer, thus delaying the need for formal care and/or admission to residential care-have not been specifically included in the impact assessment, so if benefits do arise this will free up resources which can be spent on offering more people reablement services. Neither the number of individuals who already benefit from reablement, nor the precise scale of the benefits, is known for certain. For this reason, no attempt has been made to quantify the net cost/benefit of reablement services.

Note:

1 The RAP data for 2007-08 can be found at: www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/social-care/adult-social-care-information/community-care-statistics-2007-2008:-referrals-assessments-and-packages-of-care-for-adults-england-provisional-council-data.