Lords delay plan to ease bed-blocking

Proposals to fine councils which fail to ease hospital bed-blocking suffered a setback yesterday after the House of Lords voted for a one-year delay to the scheme.

Ministers wanted to charge local authorities, which fail to get elderly patients out of hospital quickly enough, from April but the Bill was defeated by 152 votes to 123 after peers backed a one-year postponement.

Under the Community Care (Delayed Discharges) Bill, social services departments will be "fined" for delaying patients' discharges by not providing sufficient community care. But peers of all parties criticised the Bill, warning it would leave local authorities no time to improve care services before it comes into force.

The Bishop of Chelmsford, the Right Reverend John Perry, said the Bill tended to treat people, "as commodities and financial liabilities to be shunted around rather than fellow citizens, each with their own human stories, each deserving to be treated with dignity, respect and care".

Earl Howe, the Conservative health spokesman, said the measure was "misconceived". He added: "Much as many of us may deplore this Bill our job in this revising chamber, in the words of the Beatles, is to 'take a sad song and make it better'.

"The timetable is very rushed, local authorities tell us that they are currently far from being fully prepared."

Labour's Baroness Finaly of Llandaff warned: "There will be a need to recruit and train some staff if improvements are to occur and I sincerely hope that it is not the intention to drive this through rapidly so there is no time for such driving up of standards.

"I have a deep fear that unless this Bill is thought through and the systems in place to drive up standards are there, the people who will suffer will be the patients and the thing that will suffer will be patient choice."

But Lord Hunt of King's Heath, the Health minister, made a passionate defence of the Bill, arguing it was designed to stop elderly people being kept in hospital where they faced risks of infection and losing their independence.

He said: "The fact is that poor quality practice in many health services and local authorities has led to a disastrous position for older people stuck inappropriately in acute NHS beds, stuck there, risking dangers of infection, becoming institutionalised, losing their independence and therefore becoming much more difficult for them to go back either into their own home or into community care."