Time for a re-think

Over centuries – and, in some countries, still today - men and women have battled to get the vote. As Churchill reminded us, when compared to the alternatives, democracy is the least worst form of governance.

Democracy requires elections. There is no one pure type of election process; all have their strengths and weaknesses. It’s perfectly reasonable to have different sorts of election process dependent upon whether the election is for a President or a Mayor, Parliament or Council, or Executive or Revising Chamber.

But, whatever the type or process, all elections have to be conducted with absolute honesty. In many countries, we rely on International Election Observation Missions to monitor and report on the integrity of elections. In the last week, in the maelstrom of contrasting views, we have had to place some reliance on observers of the elections in Zimbabwe to get an accurate picture of events.

What is little known in the UK is that international observers have long been very critical of some of the UK’s election infrastructure. Forget for a moment that we still rely on stubby pencils, attached to a piece of string, to mark our X.

The biggest criticisms are (1) the way in which the electoral register is constructed and (2) the lack of a requirement to produce ID when we arrive at the polling station to claim our voting paper.

The first arises from historic processes and an assumption that we will tell the truth about who lives in our home and is eligible to vote. Actually, the biggest disgrace about this issue is the level of under-registration, particularly in those inner-city communities with the highest mobility.

The second arises because, unlike most of the rest of the world, we do not have a single, reliable, robust method of ID. It might be argued that the then Labour Government approached the issue of ID cards in completely the wrong way but, there can be little doubt now, that the UK missed a huge opportunity to get some sense into policies and policy implementation when proposals for bio-metric ID were abandoned.

I have no time for those politicians and newspaper editors who bang on about ‘migration being uncontrolled/we don’t know who is coming in or out of our country’ or about ‘stopping unentitled people from accessing our benefits’ system or NHS’ when they have campaigned against bio-metric ID cards which are an essential element for implementing and managing such policies. It’s hypocritical to suggest otherwise.

I’m very clear that our election processes must demonstrate integrity. I’m intolerant of those who try to abuse or cheat the system, and believe that the law should come down hard on any perpetrators.

As it happens, I do think that elections in the UK are overwhelmingly honest. However, in every year since 1945, there have been a small number of reports of ‘personation’ (obtaining a vote by pretending to be someone else), but there have been very few prosecutions or convictions. At one time, in the 1960s, it was suggested that personation had become an Olympic Sport in some parts of N Ireland, but no-one suggests it is a significant issue today.

More recently, concerns have been raised about posting vote fraud. Occurrences are not new. As it happens, I was able to see at close hand when, in the early 1980s, Sheffield Liberal Democrat Councillor Malcolm Johnson was convicted of, and imprisoned for, postal vote fraud. He had collected unused postal votes from the homes of recently deceased electors, and then voted for himself.

There have been a small number of well-publicised but isolated examples of postal vote fraud in the near twenty years since electors could choose to have a postal vote instead of having to prove that they were on their deathbed or thousands of miles away on holiday or work.

So, despite a significant amount of well-argued criticism and opposition, this government decided to undertake trials in five areas in the last elections held in May this year, when electors would have to produce ID before they could obtain their voting paper. The government said that “A report from the Electoral Commission showed that allegations of people pretending to be other people to steal their votes doubled nationally between 2014 and 2016.”

However, the results of these pilots are now out. They show that some 350 people were prevented from voting in those five areas because they did not have the right form of ID.

So, how does this compare with the problem of ‘personation’ that these pilots were said to be solving? Well, in 2014, there were 21 alleged cases of personation at a polling station, in 2016 there were 45, but in 2017 the number actually fell again to just 28 cases. Even then, the UK Statistics Authority was critical of this analysis as it did not put its figures in context, they “are not typical of the fuller time series”, which showed an average of 22 cases pa over the last decade.

To summarise, there were 172 alleged cases of personation at a polling station between 2010 and 2017, and in just five small areas, and at a cost of more than £1 million, more than twice as many people (350) who were entitled to vote were actually prevented from voting.

It is time for the government to re-think.

Leaseholders: Tell me now please

The Government is currently working with the Law Commission - the independent legal body charged with reviewing and simplifying the law and for making recommendations for changing or clarifying the law - on certain issues relating to existing leaseholders.

The Government has also promised to undertake further consultation and then propose new legislation on banning new leasehold houses and making restrictions to ground rents.

However, as an all-party committee of MPs concerned with Housing , Communities and Local Government, we are particularly concerned with what more can be done for existing leaseholders, in both houses and flats. There are around four million leasehold homes in England. We’ve heard evidence that leaseholders are often affected by onerous terms such as high service and administrative charges, large increases in ground rents and barriers to buying freeholds.

That’s why we have launched an inquiry¹ into the Government’s leasehold reform programme and in particular how existing leaseholders in both houses and flats facing onerous leasehold terms can be supported. We will examine progress made on leasehold reform, following the conclusion of the Government’s consultation on tackling unfair practices in the leasehold market in 2017.

We want to ensure that any reforms do tackle some of the troubling practices in the sector. We will examine the effectiveness of any proposals, and find out what more needs to be done to boost confidence in the system and ensure fairness for both existing and future leaseholders.

We can only do this if you get involved.

We want you to tell us your views on

• the adequacy of the Government’s programme of work on residential leasehold reform in both houses and flats and whether additional reforms are required
• what the government could do to help existing leaseholders, in both houses and flats, who are affected by onerous leasehold terms; and
• about the implications of providing such support and government intervention to these existing leaseholders.

It’s a really tight timetable. We need to get your written submissions by Friday 7 September 2018.

So, don’t delay. Tell me now please. Just go to:

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/housing-communities-and-local-government-committee/inquiries/parliament-2017/leasehold-reform-17-19/commons-written-submission-form/

¹ https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/housing-communities-and-local-government-committee/news/leasehold-reform-launch-17-19/

Not transparent. Don’t like scrutiny.

I’m an optimist by nature. I assume that people will do the right thing, until they don’t.

I understand all about ‘spin’ – promoting the most positive things about your policies, whilst relegating the negative aspects. After all, it would be a surprise if a salesman only told you about the worst features of the product, whilst forgetting to mention the best ones. I suspect his sales bonus wouldn’t amount to much.

And, of course, I’m familiar with some people proclaiming that the glass is half full, whilst their critics will claim it is half empty.

But I don’t think that I can ever remember a time when a government, collectively, and individual government ministers worked so hard to hide the truth, to avoid scrutiny, and to refuse to answer simple questions of fact. It’s like trying to extract blood from a stone.

Let’s just put to one side for a moment – even though Brexit is the single greatest challenge to our social, economic and environmental futures - the 58 reports on the impact of Brexit on particular sectors of the UK economy that the government has consistently refused to publish. Do you think they would be hiding these reports if they told us what a rosy post-Brexit future we should be looking at?

Let’s just look at the last week.

Immediately before Parliament adjourned for the summer recess , and without notice, government ministers made a record-breaking 21 written statements. Most of these had actually been promised weeks ago, but Mrs May held them all back until the last minute to try to avoid any proper parliamentary scrutiny.

In my own special area of interest – housing, communities and local government – the Secretary of State made hugely controversial statements, including

• the National Planning Policy Framework (what some commentators called ‘a green light to developers to build all over the green belt’)
• local government finance when, as each day passes, it seems that another council announces that it is heading for financial ruin because of the government’s cuts in, and repeated failure to agree new arrangements for, adult social care and children’s services
• fundamental changes in the promised devolution of business rates
• big changes to new homes bonus payments mooted, while councils are to be told to increase council tax above inflation rates next year to partially fill the gap
• a whole package of proposed reforms to Local Economic Partnerships (LEPs)
• proposals for filling the big hole that Brexit will cause in finds to support structural change and economic renewal in the poorest areas of England

Then, we learn that, in this last year, government departments applied to keep 7,406 documents from publication by the National Archives, an increase of more than 30 per cent. This is a record level of censorship in the number of official documents that were due to have been made public.

This means that the papers are transferred from Whitehall to the National Archives but remain sealed for years, often decades, before they are declassified. Some have no date set for their release at all.

The number of closure applications dramatically increased from 4250 in 2015 to 5,974 this year. These will be released eventually but at a date well beyond the 20-year rule. There were also 1,432 retention applications, up from 793 in 2015; these are documents without a release date and which may never see the light of day.

However, it is in the very simplest of issues that we can see the real extent of the determined obfuscation, avoidance of revelation of the facts, and authorised ministerial briefing which is simply untrue.

Earlier this year, I revealed that the government’s shambolic changes to national rail timetables would see a significant increase in peak rail journey times between Sheffield and London. A spokesman for the most seriously incompetent cabinet member in the government, Christopher Grayling, told the local and national media that this was not true.

Of course, when the new timetable was published, we find that the journey time of the main train of the day, the Master Cutler, has been increased by 8 minutes.

Ever since then, through written and oral parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests, I and others have been trying to find out when the journey time for the Master Cutler will get back to the 1997, 2007 and 2017 times.

Every request has been met with a response of sickening obfuscation.

We still don’t know the answer to those simple questions.

What I can confirm is that there is not a chance of reducing these increased journey times before 2022 at the very earliest. So much for the government’s commitment to the north.

Leasehold reform?

Just imagine that you wanted to buy a new car.

So, you visited your local car dealer and discussed the options with the salesperson who, from the moment you stepped through the door, was wondering about the size of the commission that might result from any sale.

The salesperson showed you the range of vehicles on offer. You are quite taken by one car, but it’s well outside your price range. ‘Never mind’ said the salesperson. ‘I can make that entirely affordable. We have a special offer for you. You buy the car at 20% less than the price on the windscreen, but you rent the car’s electrical system. The rent is very low – and you can buy the electrics at any time you want - but it doubles every year.’

Tempted?

Probably not, but it’s the sort of deal which some people have found themselves drawn in to when buying their new home. Of course, car life is measured in years rather than decades and cars tend to depreciate rather than hold their value or appreciate, which is why ‘ground rent on the house doubles every ten years’ might not have rung the loud alarm bells that it should have done.

Clearly some house-buyers just didn’t understand the real negative impact on a house’s value that an escalating ground-rent would bring.

There are also some big questions to be asked about the warnings that should have been given by the conveyancing solicitors, especially when the solicitors were acting for both the developer and the purchaser (‘we can save you money by doing this’).

Even bigger questions still need to be asked of the builders and developers who thought they could get away with this building model, at a time when they have already been making record profits and paying multi-million pound bonuses to their directors.

The government has now announced that it plans to ban on the sale of houses on a leasehold basis. However, we are yet to see the details. In the meantime, it really is a case of caveat emptor.

Any legislation will need to carefully distinguish between ‘ground rent for leasehold’ and ‘annual service charges for the maintenance of communal areas and services on the development’. The boss of one large developer of homes for the elderly has been conflating these two things to support his opposition to any ban. No doubt, some lawyers with sharp pencils will be looking to find ways around any such ban.

Meanwhile, the Law Commission – the independent legal body charged with reviewing and simplifying the law and making recommendations for consideration for changing or clarifying the law – has now put forward some proposals to help existing leasehold homeowners to buy the freehold of their houses.

As one of the Commissioners said about the existing situation “… the law is failing homeowners: it’s complex and expensive, and leads to unnecessary conflict, costs and delay.”

The proposed measures include:

• making it easier for lease-owners to buy the freehold
• options for changing the valuation formula, which would reduce the price to be paid for the freehold, whilst still appropriately compensating landlords
• removing the minimum two year requirement before starting a claim

If you are already a leaseholder or you are contemplating the purchase of a leasehold property, I really do recommend that you make the Law Commission’s report¹part of your essential summer reading. It’s an excellent summary of the existing law, the problems and the proposed solutions. And it’s great value as you can download it free!

In September 2018, the Commission intends to publish a consultation paper on enfranchisement. This will propose a new, single regime for leasehold enfranchisement designed to benefit leaseholders of houses and flats. There will then be a public consultation on the proposals; make sure you make your views known.

And, before the end of this year, the Commission also intends to publish consultation papers on commonhold and on the Right to Manage. So, your Autumn and Christmas reading is settled as well.

¹ Leasehold enfranchisement: A summary of proposed solutions for leaseholders of houses, Law Commission

https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/lawcom-prod-storage-11jsxou24uy7q/uploads/2018/07/Solutions-for-Leasehold-Houses.pdf

Time to end the second homes’ scam

Over the last decade particularly, there has been a robust discussion about what level of council tax should be incurred by second homes.

Naturally, second home owners have argued that a second home should have a discounted council tax because it is only being used for part of the time and the occupants are highly unlikely to be using the majority of the services – adult social care and children’s services – which are responsible for the bulk of council expenditure.

Others argue that second homes are actually used for most of the year – if not bY the owner, then by families and friends and through holiday lets – and that there is no justification for any reduction.

At the moment, in England, councils can offer a second homes' discount of up to 50 if no one lives in the property on a permanent basis. This depends entirely on the policy of the local authority where the holiday home or second home is located. [There are some exceptions relating to individuals who are required to live elsewhere because of their job or if the second home is a pitch with a caravan on it or a mooring occupied by a boat.]

However, the debate has become more heated and complex because the purchase of dwellings as second homes, particularly in tourist areas including the Peak District, has made owner-occupation quite unaffordable for local working families.

Many local people have argued that the predominance of second homes has destroyed the local economy and infrastructure; there are few resident children to go to local schools and there has been a collapse in the use of local shops, pubs and post offices making them uneconomic. There has, therefore, been pressure for council tax on second homes to be set at premium levels to discourage second home ownership in those areas.

Then, last November, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond said he would give local councils the power to charge up to 100pc extra for council tax on unoccupied homes, up from 50% extra since April 2013. This reversed the direction set by the previous coalition government which had cut the powers for councils to tackle empty homes in their areas.

But, something else has been going on. Letting properties for holidays can be seen as running a business. And, if the business is small enough, it not only doesn’t require council tax to be paid on the property, it is also eligible for 100% tax relief on business rates.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of second homes that have been registered as small businesses, thus avoiding all local taxes and making absolutely no contribution to the cost of local services (like highways maintenance, refuse collection, planning, parks and libraries) that all the visitors are using. Second home owners can do this if they state that the property is available for letting for 140 days per annum. It is clear that, in many cases, there is little letting at all, and certainly not to the extent intended by the legislation.

The issue is not dividing on party political lines. Some of the strongest complainants about the current situation are local and national elected Conservatives.

Lord Deben (the former Conservative Secretary of State for the Environment, John Selwyn Gummer) thinks that

‘…some second home owners are telling a very direct lie. They have no intention of running a business. It is something that angers people when their neighbours are not paying their way. It is very simple to change.’

Property consultants are complaining that businesses are picking up the bill for this scam. According to Colliers International

‘Second homeowners are being subsidised by ‘many millions of pounds’ at the expense of firms paying full business rates’

and say that system is ‘unfair’, as it gives these holiday homeowners a ‘windfall’ of millions of pounds in tax relief.

This week, in answer to my written parliamentary question*, local government minister Rishi Sunak confirmed that there are now more than 47,000 properties which have been designated as holiday lets meaning they are excluded from paying council tax but on which business rates should normally be paid. However, the 100% Small Business Rate Relief means that most are paying nothing at all. This could be costing councils up to £80 million per annum in lost council tax income.

This isn’t fair to local families who are paying their council taxes. Neither is it fair to other businesses. The reality is that councils are being short-changed and this scam is distorting the proposals for the devolution of the business rate.

Six months ago, Mr Sunak said the situation was being investigated. Now, in response to my written question, the Minister has acknowledged the scale of the problem but just says “…the Government takes any concerns about possible council tax avoidance seriously, and is considering whether the criteria under which holiday lets are valued for business rates are appropriate.”

Let’s be clear. The time for investigation is long gone.

It’s now time to act to end this scam.

*http://www.parliament.uk/writtenanswers

Tackling anti-social behaviour

Your data privacy is important

Technological change in the last fifty years has transformed our social and economic relations more than the whole of history which preceded it. You only need to consider some of the tools we use throughout the day – for instance, mobile phones, access to the internet – and then reflect on how different our lives today would be like without them.

The digital era has not just brought new opportunities and new ways of doing things and an ability to do some things we simply couldn’t do before, it has also brought new threats to our civil liberties and opportunities for the less scrupulous to try to take advantage of us.

Hardly a week goes by now, when most households don’t experience some sort of attempted scam through text, e-mail or phone call, all centred around disclosure of your personal data. And, certainly, police forces throughout the world are struggling to address both the scale and nature of this new criminality.

One significant aspect of crime prevention – and it goes hand in hand with our privacy rights – is the backdrop of data protection legislation. At its very heart is the principle that personal data we disclose to another party for one purpose should not be disclosed to other parties without our consent.

Over the years, the Information Commissioner – responsible for securing compliance with legislation and initiating investigations and action in the event of failure – has got better at identifying and tackling those individuals and companies which break the law. But, as technology developed, so the legal protections need to be updated.

UK law in this regard is based in the 1998 Data Protection Act. In recent weeks, many of the protections have been overtaken by the European General Data Protection (GDPR) provisions. The former has a penalty cap of £500,000 whereas, under GDPR the fines’ cap is Eu20m or 4% of global turnover.

GDPR was the reason why we all recently received communications, from just about every organisation and company with which we have some relation, asking us to confirm or update our agreements to the use of our data for the future.

All that provides a background to today’s reports by the Information Commissioner^1 2 in to events at the time of the EU Referendum and the US Presidential Election which confirms that, amongst other things, the ICO:

• has fined Facebook £500,000 – just over five minutes’ Facebook revenue - for data breaches under the 1998 Act (and it could have been up to £1.4bn under the GDPR). (Facebook was fined £95m in 2017, and Google was fined £2.1bn by the EU in 2017)
• it is bringing criminal proceedings against some companies and individuals
• has stopped some companies from processing data about UK citizens
• has written to the UK's 11 main political parties compelling them to have their data protection practices audited
• has served enforcement notices on and is continuing investigations in to a number of data-broking companies
• is undertaking an investigation into allegations that an insurance services company illegally shared customer data with a Leave.EU group and used its call centre staff to make campaign calls
• is probing data misuse by various organisations, including a university department, the official Remain campaign - Britain Stronger In Europe - and a data broker

The ICO expects its next report to be complete by the end of October.

One thing that I have noticed is that a number of the prominent individuals (company directors, funders, managers and senior staff, campaigners) identified in the ICO investigations to date were also prominent in campaigns and in funding and managing organisations against bio-metric, secure identity cards in the UK, which would have assisted in protecting our data, managing our borders, and in ensuring that only UK citizens entitled to receive particular services did actually receive them.

I hope our investigative media does a lot more to highlight the hypocrisy of those who campaigned against secure ID cards, whilst apparently having little regard for the law to protect our data as they pursued their personal and commercial objectives.

¹ https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/2259371/investigation-into-data-analytics-for-political-purposes-update.pdf

² https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/2259369/democracy-disrupted-110718.pdf

What a shambles

Within 36 hours of Mrs May proclaiming Cabinet unity on her Brexit plans, her Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has described the process and the outcome as ‘like polishing a txxd’ and her Brexit Secretary, David ‘Bulldog’ Davis has resigned as he believed the plans were fundamentally flawed.

In truth, they’re both right. And that was inevitably the outcome of trying to manage the contradictions of the fundamentalist Brexiteers, who made so many completely unachievable promises, and the soft Brexiteers who know that without a deal with the EU, the UK’s economic prospects are, at best, challenging and, most likely, awful and fundamentally damaging.

At least David Davis has had the guts to resign. Although, in truth, this is mainly because his own negotiating strategy had been completely useless. This lead Mrs May to take over his responsibilities last week, including taking the key civil servants out of the Brexit Department and putting them directly under her control in No 10.

Meanwhile, the ever-opportunist Boris Johnson, whose whole political strategy has been solely driven by his own ambitions to be prime minister, has declared himself officially fully supporting Mrs May’s plans whilst, at the same time, leaking stories to the media of him describing the plans as useless. Nothing new there.

It is a shambles and, at this rate, we’re heading for an even bigger shambles economically.

So, perhaps now is the time just to take stock of the last 8 years of Conservative government with a few facts:

• Wages are lower in real terms than in 2010 and are falling
• The gap between lower and higher earners is increasing. FTSE100 CEOs are now paid 160 times average earnings.
• 3 million people, that’s 1 in 10 of the workforce, are now in insecure jobs (no guaranteed hours or employment rights) and the number is rising with 883,000 already being on zero-hours’ contracts
• The poorest 10% pay 42% of their income in taxes, whilst the richest 10% pay 34%
• 30% of British children now live in poverty, the highest since 2010, and the number is rising
• Almost 60% of those living in poverty are in working households. It’s little surprise that nearly 1.4 million foodbank parcels were distributed last year.

The Conservatives have led us in to this mess and there is no sign of their having any strategy or policies to get us out of it.

What a shambles.

The Brexiteers’ Business Britain

Do you remember Boris Johnson’s promise of an extra £350m a week for the NHS if we leave the EU? Yes, that promise posted all over the side of a red double-decker bus.

Well, having tried running the NHS in to the ground, creating such a public backlash that Mrs May has had to do a U-turn and promised to increase NHS funding by about £350m a week, you would have thought that the Brexiteers would have been celebrating their promise coming true, wouldn’t you?

Except, no. We learn that the £350 million is to be funded half by taxes and half by borrowing. What about the Brexit bonus, you ask. Well, it’s now been confirmed that even if the UK gets everything it has been demanding – fat chance! – there won’t be any Brexit bonus for at least a decade.

Then, do you remember the Brexiteers claims that there would be scores of countries queueing up to do new trade deals with the UK after we quit the EU at enormous benefit to British business and jobs in Britain?

But now we know that there aren’t scores of countries queueing up to do deals. Actually, there are a few countries who are prepared to do deals…but only if Britain concedes to concessions which fly in the face of other promises (for example, amongst other things, India says that it wants a massive increase in UK visas for its citizens) or concessions with massive implications for the UK economy (for example, New Zealand wants open access for its lamb and dairy products, which would in one stroke destroy Welsh agriculture).

And what does British business think about the prospects? Not much.

Investment in British car factories fell steadily after 2016 and by nearly 50% in the past six months. When Airbus said it was now actively considering moving airplane wing production out of the UK and on to mainland EU, Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Health Secretary, said the government should ignore the concerns, and Boris Johnson said “Fxxx business.” How asinine can you get? Remember that Airbus employs 14,000 workers directly and supports another 110,000 in other businesses and generates £1.7bn in tax each year.

And do you remember the Brexiteers’ promises of cutting business regulation and bureaucracy? They would never answer the direct question about which regulations and which bureaucracy, but now an investigation and report from Nottingham University tells us precisely what they meant.

It is exampled in that burgeoning new industry, seemingly cropping up on every vacant space in the country. Mrs Thatcher had us all taking in each other’s washing to grow the economy. The Brexiteers have found the solution to economic growth and Britain’s business future in…car washes.

The investigators discovered that there are up to 20,000 hand car washes, most unregulated. A two-year study found not one car wash paying the national minimum wage. Tax evasion by hand car washes is costing the Treasury between £500 million and £1 billion a year. Some staff have their passports seized while others are effectively in modern slavery.

Welcome to the Brexiteers’ Britain.

Let’s commit to a civilised society

Ensuring that senior citizens and adults with chronic disabilities and illnesses are supported and cared for is one hallmark of a civilised society. Unfortunately, right now, each and every day, we are moving further and further away from matching that ambition.

I’ve written and spoken many times about the short- and long-term challenges for adult social care and the impact on individuals and their families, friends and carers.

I am the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee [HoCoLoGo Comm]. Sarah Wollaston is a Conservative MP and a GP and Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee [HSC Comm] Committees.

Because we believed this was so serious, our committees got together, determined to investigate and make informed and evidenced recommendations about the future of personal adult social care.

Governments have commissioned report after report, and made promise after promise, about the need to implement new policies and funding arrangements to address the growing chasm between the need for care and the resources to fund it.

Each and every promise was broken.

We end up with hospital bed-blocking, chaos in Accident and Emergency departments, 500,000 fewer people receiving support than just 5 years ago, councils being told to implement year-on-year inflation-busting council tax increases to plug some of the gap, and all-purpose councils now spending more than 50% of their budgets on adult social care.

We’ve had nothing but dither and delay.

The latest promise of a government report and action in the Autumn is one that must be met.

But, if any issue needed an all-party review, which engaged citizens in the debate, then adult social care is that issue. We knew that the matter was so serious that people expect all parties to put away sectarian interests, be open and transparent about the challenges and to stop shrouding their deliberations in secrecy.

That is why MPs of all parties on our committees decided to tackle the issue in an open way, putting aside party interests, inviting evidence and contributions from all interested parties and the public at large, and hold public evidence and scrutiny sessions. We even established a Citizens’ Assembly to consider the issues and report to us

If anyone ever wanted an example of everyone working together in the public interest, this report is it.

And, that’s why we have no reservation in asking the government, opposition parties and the public to take seriously what we are saying and what we are recommending.

This is about how we support and care for our grand-parents, our parents, brothers, sisters and cousins and, eventually, about how each and every one of us is cared for.

Doing nothing is not an option.

Every alternative we have considered has advantages and disadvantages.

We were very conscious about the need to be fair between individuals and between generations.

We believe that the six principles for funding social care have captured the correct balance between competing interests:

* Providing high quality care

* Considering working age adults as well as older people

* Ensuring fairness on the ‘who and how’ we pay for social care, including between the generations

* Aspiring over time towards universal access to personal care free at the point of delivery

* Risk pooling - protecting people from catastrophic costs, and protecting a greater portion of their savings and assets

* ‘Earmarking’ of contributions to maintain public support.

You can’t pick and choose the bits you like and reject the rest.

This is a complete package of recommendations which addresses both today’s acute problems and the challenges for many years to come.

I want you to read our report and to tell me what you think.

You can find the report, including an executive summary, at

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/housing-communities-and-local-government-committee/