Now for something completely different. These amendments hardly deserve the epithet “probing”—more a light examination by the doctor’s fingers. What they do is, in essence, simple. They substitute for the monetary cap proposed by the Government a cap based on the number of years a person has been receiving care at a substantial level.
The origins of my amendment were in a proposal floated in the minority report to the 1999 royal commission on the funding of long-term care. As I was the author, I remember this quite well. It did not even gain the support of a majority of the minorities, as the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, declined to sign up to it. Nevertheless, it has had a life after death and I think it can claim paternity —the noble Lord, Lord Warner, knows better than I—for the cap proposal in the Dilnot report, because it shares precisely the same objective as the
cap: to limit the costs of care to those unlucky enough to require it for a long time as it costs a lot of money. That is the aim of the proposal.
When I first saw the Dilnot proposal, I thought that it was clearly superior to the one in the minority report—everyone would spend the same before the state kicked in. But as time has gone on I have become much less sure of this as two defects of the Dilnot version have become more apparent. The first is that it is extremely complex for local authorities to administer. There have been figures of between £300 million and £500 million floating about for the cost of administration, before money is handed out to people. That is because, to implement the Dilnot report, it is necessary to track each individual from the time the meter starts ticking to see exactly what they are spending on care or, rather worse, to see exactly what a local authority thinks it should be providing in spending on care for each individual—a sort of abstract concept that has to be turned into a concrete figure.
As will be apparent from other amendments I have tabled, I am not even confident that local authorities will have their systems sufficiently sorted to manage it by the proposed start date of April 2016. There is a non-negligible risk that this will prove to be universal benefit mark 2, a scheme that will in practice prove impossible to operate. I hope I am wrong but the fact is that, putting the best face on it, it will cost a lot of money to implement without any of that money going to better care, and not a penny of it going to the people who should be helped. In the Government’s ghastly jargon, it will be money spent on bureaucracy, not front-line services. That is my first query about the Dilnot way of doing things.
My second point is equally worrying. The Dilnot system is terribly difficult for anyone normal to understand. When do you start to get it? How much is assessed as being the cost of the care that you may get from the council? How much have I spent? How much of that counts towards the cap? People may say, “My care costs differ because my condition goes up and down”. All those factors are crucial if people are to know what they spend out of their own pockets. I am sure that better-off people who are in full possession of their faculties will work it out, but we know that 40% of people over 80 have some degree of dementia and are therefore not in full possession. Certainly, those with computer-literate families and sons or daughters who happen to be independent financial advisers will crack it all right. Their claims for substantial care needs will be there on day one in a large pile on the local authority’s desk. They will know every penny that has been spent, but are we confident that everyone else will? Just explaining the system and the process of communication, to which we shall come later, will be jolly difficult. It should be remembered that more than half the people think that the state at the moment pays their entire care costs without deductions. There is a long way to go from there to understanding Dilnot.
By comparison, a time-based system is simplicity itself. You have an assessment, and if it shows that you need substantial care or its equivalent under the new system, the clock starts ticking. Five years later, you no longer have to pay the cost of your care. That is
very simple. Five years is what you have to find. In my variant, the council would then pick up the whole cost, not some notional cost, as under the Dilnot cap, and you would simply have to find your hotel costs where applicable. That is simplicity itself and, incidentally, it makes it much easier for you to insure privately. Private insurance companies are going to struggle to know how much their liability will be under the Dilnot system. Under a time-based system, they will know that they have a liability. If you live more than five years the state will pick up the bill and the only bit that they will have to cover is the first five years.
How does that compare in generosity with Dilnot? It will probably be about the same. The Dilnot cap would be reached by someone in residential care rather more quickly than the five years but, on the other hand, as you are going to be paid only in part if you reach the cap, you may not be any better off. I suspect that for those receiving care in their own homes my proposal will prove to be more generous than Dilnot’s £72,000 cap. In most cases, people will take more than five years to reach the £72,000 and it may therefore be slightly more generous to people who live at home, which is no dreadful thing.
Sunny optimist though I am, I do not expect the Minister to go snap on my scheme today. I am not even sure that I do. He and his colleagues had enough trouble getting the Government to sign up to Dilnot, and they will not want to execute any unnecessary U-turns now. However, I suggest that he puts this proposal in his bottom drawers because it may become apparent in six, 12 or 18 months’ time that Dilnot, as encapsulated in the Bill, is simply impossible to administer on any realistic timetable. When that day dawns— I hope it does not—my scheme may come in handy. I beg to move.