4 July 2011 : Column 1233

Andrew Dilnot’s report comes at the same time as the final report from the palliative care funding review, which I received last week. Tom Hughes-Hallett and Sir Alan Craft have made an excellent start in looking at this complex and challenging issue. We want to see integrated, responsive and high-quality health and care services for those at the end of life. We will now consider the review team’s proposals in detail before consulting stakeholders on the way forward later this summer. We will also consider how best to undertake substantial piloting, as recommended in the report, in order to gather information on how best to deliver palliative care services.

We are also responding to events at Southern Cross, which have caused concern to residents in Southern Cross care homes and their families. We welcome the fact that Southern Cross, the landlords and the lenders are working hard to come up with a plan to stabilise the ownership and operation of the care homes. We have also made it clear that we will take action to ensure proper oversight of the market in social care. That is why we are seeking powers through the Health and Social Care Bill to extend to social care the financial regulatory regime that we are putting in place in the NHS, if we decide that that is needed as part of wider reform.

A central component of those wider reforms will be the long-term funding of care and support. Over the past 12 months Andrew Dilnot, who chairs the Commission on Funding of Care and Support, together with the noble Lord Warner and Dame Jo Williams, has engaged extensively with many different stakeholders. They have brought fresh insight and impetus to this most challenging area of public policy. We welcome the commission’s excellent work and its final report. I would like to thank Andrew Dilnot, Lord Warner and Jo Williams for their work, which has made an immensely valuable contribution to meeting the long-term challenge of an ageing population.

The report argues that people are unable to protect themselves against the risk of high care costs, leaving them fearful and uncertain about the future. The commission’s central proposal, therefore, is a cap on the care costs that people face over their lifetime of between £25,000 and £50,000—it recommends £35,000. Under the commission’s proposals, people who cannot afford to make their personal contribution would continue to receive means-tested support, but it proposes that the threshold for receiving state help for residential care costs would rise from £23,250 to £100,000. People would make some contribution to their general living costs in residential care, but the commission suggests that this should be limited to between £7,000 and £10,000.

The commission also proposes the following standardised, national eligibility for care, which would increase consistency across the country; universal access to a deferred payments scheme for means-tested contributions; improvements in information and advice; improved assessments for carers and better alignment between social care and the wider care and support system; and considering changing the means test in domiciliary care to include housing assets. The commission makes recommendations about how as a society we can organise and fund social care. We will consider the recommendations as a priority.

The commission recognises that implementing its reforms would have significant costs. In the current public spending environment, the Government will have