I am very grateful to the noble Lord for that full response and to everyone who spoke in the debate. There was a very thoughtful and humane response around the Chamber. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Swinfen, for drawing attention to some of the inexorable facts of an ageing society and the challenges that we face. The Minister was right when he said we were looking at an accumulation of programmes caused by an historic failure to come to terms with a society that is ageing. It is because it is historic failure that it is urgent. That is why, while I appreciate that the Government do not want to put a new duty on local authorities, we need a clearer and more urgent sense of priorities from them that this needs to be addressed.
There is a lot of good stuff happening, but we need a national conversation about the challenges that we face, and it can be led only by the Government. It is a wider debate than the one that we have had today, and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, referred to it in her excellent amendment. It is a debate about where housing in an ageing population fits into the challenge of housing the whole nation. If we provide on the assumption of an ageing population, as Berkeley Homes does so well, we free up housing stock and make it easier to find homes for families. As my noble friend Lady Hollis said, we are looking at the opportunities
presented by enormous numbers of smart technologies, which will help us not only to provide the sort of housing that would really suit ageing people but to reduce the costs to the health service. This is an important amendment, because it raises a debate that really goes to the heart of what this Bill is about and how intelligently it plans for the future, but also what we as a country are about in the care that we give to our older families.
4.45 pm
In relation to what the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said—and I appreciate that she has huge experience—my amendment did not take any discretion away from local authorities. It is essentially a problem that has to be solved and designed and delivered at a local level. I call on the Government to rise to the occasion and show some stronger leadership. To come back to what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said in a telling phrase, “It simply hasn’t been a priority”. Well, all I can say is that it is time that it was a priority. Since the Government have it on their watch, I hope that they will make it more of an explicit priority. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.