My Lords, I support the creative thinking of my noble friend. The truth of the matter is that we certainly did not have enough time to go into the kind of detail that he has done, which he has explained very clearly. I have to confess that we were not aware of the nursing allowance. Perhaps we should have been. If we had been, I think that we would have justified the scrapping of it by saying that that would be used to help to finance our mainstream proposals.
Also, we said in our report that we thought that the Government should look again at the personal expenses allowance. We thought that it was extremely mean. In a way, it has not kept pace with inflation over the years and it now seems a rather derisory amount. Therefore, anything that could be done to improve that without increasing the cost of public expenditure would seem to us a good idea.
I commend my noble friend for his creativity. I hope that the Government will take his amendment away and look at it seriously to see whether something can be done with it, because I think that it is an improvement on our recommendations.