Baroness Barker (LD)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, including the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell; I disagree with him, but he raised an important point. It is entirely wrong to characterise the amendments as “blunderbuss” and “scattergun”. We are dealing with a very crude fiscal measure that will impact all sorts of sectors in different ways. The amendments, on the contrary, are not; they are very targeted and precise, and they are different attempts to mitigate the overall problem. My amendments are confined solely to health and social care. One of the issues I am driving at in them is that, for all the announcements of increases in funding, particularly those for the NHS that the Minister just laid out for us, the question of productivity and sustainability of public services is very important. A key aspect of this is driving down demand on the NHS. The work done by many of these organisations, if it is correctly funded and targeted, will lead in future to a lower demand for elective surgery in the NHS. We are not a “blunderbuss” at all; we are trying to be very precise about what we are doing. Secondly, perhaps it is not particularly obvious but a number of noble Lords might understand this: thousands of people in this country continue to be able to work because their family members are looked after by these organisations. This is a question not just about the cost of public services; it is about the indirect costs to the economy of taking people out of other productive jobs in order to sustain their family members. Finally, many of the services that I and other people are trying to maintain are comparatively inexpensive. A lot of them rely on volunteers, and they are much less expensive than acute public services. For all those reasons, this is important. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad: I do not think we have had an adequate impact assessment of the Bill. If we had, perhaps we would have been able to take on more of what the Minister was indicating. I think he does not get that these are not wrecking amendments. They are about trying to improve the nation’s health, well-being and finances as a whole. In view of all that, I wish to test the opinion of the House.