My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord who sat on the Dilnot committee. I think it was a first-class report, which, at the time, I was prepared to endorse as the least bad solution to the social care problem. But I have changed my mind since then. Why? Because the facts have changed. I set out some of those facts when I spoke in Committee, and they include the large rise in house prices that makes many people much more able to pay for care for themselves at the moment. The facts have changed again in the last couple of weeks because of this disgusting war that has broken out in Ukraine. As a consequence, we are going to have to spend more on defence, as the Germans have already recognised. Therefore, public budgets are going to have to be squeezed in other areas. I regret those squeezes, but it is President Putin’s fault, not ours.
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In those circumstances, to add more than £2 billion to the cost of the welfare state seems an extravagance. It seems still more of an extravagance to add a further £1 billion, which will be necessary if the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady Wheeler is accepted. We just cannot play around with money on that scale at this time, however good the cause.
I have previously put to the Minister my own preferred way forward, which is to look for a private-public partnership, at much less cost to the public purse, which could enable people who wish to protect themselves and their heirs from care costs to do so without recourse to the state. In addition, just in case the Government persist with the Bill, I suggest that if they really want to help poor people, my own side would not be looking to get rid of the amendment moved by the Government in the other House at the last moment but would be doing something to reduce the taper, which viciously attacks people with assets up to £100,000. The amendment that the Government have put forward and which Labour opposes stretches help up to people with £186,000. To reduce the taper, as I propose in my Amendment 142, would concentrate all the help on the people with less than £100,000.
I am afraid that we are on the wrong course here and getting out of it will not be easy. However, this is a weight of public expenditure that is ill directed, aimed
at—and indeed entirely benefiting—the better-off half of the population, and which does nothing for the worse-off half of the population, who, most of all, need better care. It is misconceived policy in today’s circumstances and I hope that the amendments, apart from my own, will not carry.