My Lords, a little belatedly, noble Lords might like to hear from one-third of the Dilnot Commission; I declare my interest as that third. I have to say that our ideas have been presented in a whole variety of ways over the last 10 years. This evening, they have been presented fairly accurately, which is refreshing.
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I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that the private sector had its chances. It was conspicuous by its absence, particularly the insurance industry. We made these proposals because of the absence of many alternatives. Andrew Dilnot and I would never claim that this was a perfect solution that would satisfy everybody; it was a solution to do what the report said—Fairer Care Funding. The report never claimed that it would sort out all the problems of funding adult social care, although it did point out to the Government of the day—the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, may remember this—that adult social care was underfunded by about £1 billion. This was in the 2010-11 financial year. That gap has simply widened over the past decade, so that it
is probably somewhere around six to eight times that £1 billion, judged on the eligibility criteria in 2010. So we never set out to do that.
What we did was to come up with a cap, which we said should be between £25,000 and £50,000. Our preferred figure was £35,000, which the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, accurately reflected in her amendment. She has done everybody a service by giving a reasonable inflation figure in scaling up £35,000 to today’s prices. That has never been done. How the Government got to £86,000 is something of a mystery, but no doubt the Minister will clarify why there is this difference between the noble Baroness’s uprating of £35,000 and how the Government got to £86,000. It is certainly tempting sometimes, just to get a cap, to go with £86,000, but it is not what we actually said. When we wrote our report, we costed it. We pointed out that, if you went for a £50,000 cap, it would cost about £1.3 billion and, if you went for £35,000, it would add another £0.5 billion.
I am telling tales out of school slightly here. We consulted people such as the shadow Chancellor, who said that we would not frighten the horses if we came up with a solution that was south of £2 billion a year. That is what we did, and it has taken 10 years to get from where we were with this report to the coalition Government to be even having a discussion about implementing it, even though the framework was put in place in the 2014 Act. I confess to having been on the Select Committee that looked at that in draft. It was a rather good Act, which had the framework to implement the recommendations in this report.
You do not need all the—if I may say—stingy recommendations and amendments put forward by the Government. There is nothing wrong with the recommendation of the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. We made this very clear in the report, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said; if noble Lords want to look it up, and do not believe me or the noble Baroness, they should go to page 24 of Fairer Care Funding. That sets out what you would do with people who developed an eligible need up to the age of 40. It is worth saying something about why we justified that.
We do not think that people younger than 40 can, in general, realistically be expected to have planned for having a care and support need, nor will they have accumulated significant assets. People may still be paying off debts and have significant amounts to pay on their mortgage, and could have young families. We recognised those problems, and it is why we recommended a zero cap. There is not a lot of argument about that; it is a straightforward explanation of what the evidence said when we were drawing up this report. I support the non-governmental amendments, and think that the Minister should go back to his colleagues and start to think again.