I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention—I think. What I can say here and what I might say outside are not the same, and I do have to finish my speech, so I will leave it there. I am sure that the public will make up their own minds about the veracity or otherwise of comments made by the Prime Minister.
Sir Andrew Dilnot said that the proposals will create a north-south divide, that those with assets of £106,000 will be hardest hit and that anyone with assets under £186,000 will be worse off than under his proposals. According to the Health Foundation, assuming care costs of about £500 a week, those with assets of £150,000 will take a year and a half longer to reach the cap than they would have under the Dilnot proposals, those with assets of £125,000 will take four and a half
years longer, and those with assets of under £106,000 will never reach the care cap. Contrary to what the Minister has said, people with assets of £106,000 or less will not benefit from the proposal at all.
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The Dilnot commission specifically said that excluding state contributions from the cap would be unfair for those on lower incomes and would mean that they would contribute the same as the wealthy over a longer period, but that is where we find ourselves today with the new clause. Ordinary people on modest incomes will pay an extra tax that will not stop them having to sell their home to pay for their care costs, but that will mean the mansion-dwelling millionaires can keep theirs.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) said, we have a reverse Robin Hood situation. People on lower incomes will pay into a system that they will see little benefit from, but that will protect 90% of a property worth £1 million. In case hon. Members need help translating that into what it means for their constituents, I have a selection of median house prices in various constituencies across the country: in Hartlepool, the median house price is £128,000; in Bishop Auckland, it is £125,000; in Blackpool South, it is £114,000; in Stoke-on-Trent Central, it is £112,000; in Hyndburn, it is £110,000; and in Burnley, it is £99,000. The owners of such houses would all probably have to sell their homes under these plans.
Those figures are replicated across huge areas of the country, so it is not just a few people in those constituencies who will lose out, but thousands of people, mainly in the midlands and the north of England, who will be forced to sell their home while those in more affluent areas of the country can keep theirs. That is not fairness or fixing social care, but a betrayal. We on this side of the Chamber always thought that levelling up was just a slogan with little substance, but we now know that it is worse than that. It is a con trick—a lie—that will leave many of those whom it was meant to support worse off than they would have been otherwise.
Conservative Members who loyally trooped through the Lobby in September to impose the social care levy, knowing that it would have a disproportionate impact on their less well-off constituents who paid into it, must now—to use a phrase that we have heard many times in the last week—be suffering from buyer’s remorse. It must have dawned on them that they have been sold a pup, that there is no plan to fix social care, that the Bill will not stop people having to sell their home, and that the only people it will help are those who are already comfortably well off.
The only way that Conservative Members can represent their constituents, who voted for them because they believed that the Conservative party had changed and was at last on the side of ordinary people, is by joining us in the Lobby to vote against the Government, and by showing that they will not stand for a Government who break their promises. When the chickens come home to roost, and families in their constituency say to them, “We were promised that we wouldn’t have to sell our home to pay for care costs,” what will they say? Will they tell them that they voted for it even though they knew what would happen? Will they tell them that promises do not really matter? Or will they tell them that when it came to the crunch, they stood up for what
is right and what is in the interests of the people they were elected to represent, and said to the Government, “No. Think again”?
Finally, I remind Conservative members of the manifesto on which they stood for election, which said clearly and unambiguously of social care that,
“The prerequisite of any solution will be a guarantee that no one needing care has to sell their home to pay for it.”
If they do not think that the Government new clause gives that guarantee, and if they think that it breaks the promise they made to the electorate, they should join us in the Lobby, take back control and vote against it.