‘Free care for vulnerable’ bill killed off by Lords coalition

The government conceded that its eye-catching bill to provide free care at home for the vulnerable will have to wait until after the election after peers inflicted a series of defeats.

The bill, announced to widespread surprise by the prime minister at Labour’s conference last autumn, set out to provide 400,000 vulnerable elderly people with free personal care in their homes, at an annual cost of £670m.

Government sources accepted that it had lost the bill to a coalition of Labour, Tory and Liberal peers who votedin favour of amendments that moved the start of the service to April next year instead of October 2010, called on both houses to vote again on the bill, and another that would delay the implementation of the bill until ministers had proved its plans were affordable.

Only a third of the cost of the intended scheme would have been funded by the Department of Health while the rest would be met by local authorities.

Peers backed an amendment by Lord Best, a crossbench peer and president of the Local Government Association (LGA), who spoke of the “anxieties” of councils across the country having to find costs of quarter of a billion pounds during a time of economic crisis.

The Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: “This is a humiliating defeat for the government on a shabby, shameless, short-term measure which would do nothing to heal a social care system in crisis. This vote marks the death knell of a cynical attempt to buy the votes of older people which would have led to cuts in social services for some of the most vulnerable.”