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5.15 pm
We made all those points in Committee, and the Minister responded to them. On 6 June, he gave a very straightforward response. He said:
If the Minister opposes our amendment, he will owe it to the House to explain why his preferred solution in Committee is now not acceptable and why it is not reasonable to say that this provision should be available only in exceptional circumstances. If he does not accept our amendment, he will have a lot of explaining to do.
Amendment No. 106 seeks to ensure that delay does not apply when people are awaiting a move out of hospital or in which delay in approving a renovation grant would have a detrimental effect on their long-term health or safety. Those are obvious requirements of any civilised society, and they are sensible in the interests of saving public money by not keeping people in hospital beds for longer than necessary.
Amendment Nos. 105 and 106 make a great deal of sense and give effect to the proposal made by the Minister in Committee. I hope that the Government will accept them. If they do not accept them, I sincerely hope that the House will ensure that they are incorporated into the Bill.
Mr. Chris Davies:
I endorse many of the comments made by the hon. Member for Greenwich, particularly his remarks on the alarm and concern caused by delays. I am surprised, however, that he did not go further in his amendment. We have tried to impose tighter limits in
I am not convinced that disabled facilities grants should be further delayed in the manner proposed by the Minister and as provided for in the Bill. We believe that the maximum period should be reduced, and we should have been very happy if the suggestion of a reduction to six months had been incorporated into the amendment moved by the hon. Member for Greenwich.
I also seek the Minister's views on the subject, and an explanation of why the far too extensive period allocated to local authorities for payment of the grant should remain in the Bill. Surely he should have recognised by now that there is no justification for that provision. It is yet another example of the Minister giving disabled people a lower place in the queue than that to which they are entitled.
Mr. Stevenson:
I look forward to the Minister's response because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich (Mr. Raynsford) said, during our discussions in Committee, the Minister accepted the principle. He said that local authorities would use the power "only in exceptional circumstances", which is exactly what the amendment seeks to do. I hope that I am correct in assuming that we are not talking about the principle, but about the method of obtaining the result.
Amendment No. 105 seeks to place the Minister's commitment on the face of the Bill. That is the best method to use for such an important subject. I hope that the Minister will agree and accept that that is the right thing to do. If he does not, we shall listen carefully to how he intends to deliver the commitment that he gave in Committee. The fact that the Government are attempting to strike the right balance between the available resources and expectations of what the Minister describes as a demand-led scheme is well documented.
The Government's refusal to accept the amendment in Committee on the basis of the need to avoid causing local authorities considerable financial difficulty, is also well documented. My experience of local authorities is that they are pretty good at managing such matters, although resources present a considerable problem. I think that most of us agreed with the Minister when he said, as he did in Committee, that he would expect such applications to be processed in no more than six months. He was talking about the processing of the applications. As the amendment states, we are talking about further delays in the system in terms of payments.
Let us not confuse the Minister's reassuring words in Committee--that he would expect applications to be processed in no more than six months--which we would all accept, with the amendment, which deals with when the payments begin. Clause 36 involves an inbuilt delay of 12 months in the vital matter of mandatory grants for disabled facilities. For the reasons outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich, we believe that that is wrong, not only in principle but in practice. Given the Minister's commitment to the principle, I hope that he
will accept the need for the provision to be placed on the face of the Bill and accept amendment No. 105.
Mr. Clappison:
It is clear from the debate that the disabled facilities grant is important. It has been a successful grant and it will continue to be successful, providing many disabled people with facilities and modifications to make their life easier and safer--but it will be a demand-led system. As we said in Committee, clause 36 is an honest and open attempt to deal with the problems that sometimes arise from a demand-led system. I emphasise the word "sometimes" and I shall be more specific about that later.
In respect of amendment No. 61, I must draw the attention of the hon. Member for Littleborough and Saddleworth to the fact that the Bill already provides that all applications must be determined no later than six months after they were made and that a grant must be paid when the works have been completed. His amendment, which would reduce the period that local authorities would be able to delay from 12 to six months, would not give them much of the extra flexibility that we seek to give them to deal with some of the problems that can arise.
Amendment No. 61 might provide authorities with a little flexibility, but not much, as they could inform an applicant shortly after the application was made--within one or two months--that it had been approved, but that they would not pay grant for another four or five months. It would not give authorities the flexibility that they will need. The purpose of our proposal is to enable authorities to exert some control over mandatory grant expenditure, including scheduling payments between financial years if necessary, to help them comply with the requirement placed on them to operate within an annual budget.
Mr. Davies:
Will the Minister confirm that his objective is to give local authorities flexibility on payment, but that the cost of that will be to slow down the payment of grants to disabled people who need them? Will he spell that out to the House?
Mr. Clappison:
The hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that the purpose of the proposal is to give local authorities the flexibility that they need to deal with the problems that can sometimes arise. Those who are familiar with the grant system will be familiar with the sort of problems involved. The measure is an open and straightforward way of attempting to deal with those problems.
The hon. Member for Greenwich showed a fondness for Shakespeare. His contribution would best be accompanied by the Shakespearean stage direction of alarum and excursion. The hon. Gentleman raised some alarms that were not necessarily appropriate in this context. We have made it clear throughout the Bill's passage that the provisions in clause 36 are for use only in exceptional circumstances.
I am sympathetic to the point that lies behind amendment No. 105, but I do not believe that the amendment would be an appropriate way of achieving that objective. Placing the phrase "in exceptional circumstances" on the face of the Bill would only store up future problems of interpretation. The scope for judicial review would be potentially wider and the real
beneficiaries might be lawyers rather than grant applicants. The hon. Gentleman and I share common ground in that we both want to reduce the amount of work for lawyers arising from the provisions. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not want to introduce anything that would increase that volume of work.
"I can give some reassurance to the Committee. The power is discretionary and we envisage that local authorities will use it only in exceptional circumstances."--[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 6 June 1996; c. 178.]
I hope that the Minister will remember those words, because they are precisely the words of our amendment. Our amendment seeks to put the words "in exceptional circumstances" in the Bill and to give effect to the expression of hope that the Minister gave the Committee.
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