My Lords, this has been a helpful debate and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in it—overwhelmingly, I should add, in support of my amendment. I take great confidence from that.
The noble Earl has made not a bad job of answering my four questions about the £3.8 billion. I am feeling generous and so will give him a B minus for his attempts. At least he has come clean that only half the money is new money, which is a helpful clarification, and that only half of the £1 billion of the rest will be paid up front, while the rest is dependent. Therefore, to some extent my point has been made that that £3.8 billion looks a little less glossy than when it was announced in terms of what new money people will get in 2015-16. I notice that the noble Earl did not answer my question about the base budget, which took up much of my speech. The bottom line in all this is that the base budget is very deficient. The local authorities which will take on these new roles are starting, essentially, from a deficit position.
The noble Earl is always one of the most plausible Ministers and has done a good job of explaining efficiencies and productivity. However, the people who gave evidence to the Joint Select Committee just do not believe that this has all been achieved through efficiencies. They are seeing cuts in services and tougher eligibility criteria. The interesting mini-debate we had about the difference in payments for publicly funded people in care homes and self-funders illustrates that local authorities have been cutting the rate for the job for those who they pay for. We will see more of that. Until we face up to this base budget issue, we will have a problem.
I do not doubt that the Government have done a pretty reasonable job of costing the new provisions in the Bill. However, it will be introduced on the basis that the underlying base budget is too low. No one has yet answered my question with very much confidence about the fact that we are talking about a base budget deficit, which is in the Dilnot report, and which in broad terms has risen two and a half times since this Government came to office. That is the nub of this issue.
The noble Earl also glided over with his usual elegance the issue of why the Government are so preoccupied with this rather strange way of giving money to local government. First you see the Department for Communities and Local Government take money away and then local authorities have to cut other services if they want to prop up social care. Then Health Ministers, almost in desperation and worried about the implications for the NHS of what is happening to social care, long before they were betting the farm on integrated care, are—perfectly understandably—starting to slide money across to prop up social care. That is what is going on. If I were a director of social services these days, I would find it rather difficult to plan my service response to a kind of resource allocation system based on that kind of approach. That is a real problem for central government, which is expecting local authorities to plan well for these new changes. It is a pretty messy way of giving money to people at the local level.
I will read very carefully what the noble Earl has said in this debate. I am not convinced that we do not need an impartial review. If it is not the OBR I will think of somebody else. I might try a few on the noble Earl during the Recess—the Institute for Fiscal Studies comes to mind. We need a hard look by somebody who is not party pris. If my own party wins the 2015 election, it will need that hard look as well. I will think about it further, but in the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.