As the Care and Support Bill prepares for the House of Lords, Paul Robertson meets Partnership mananging director Chris Horlick for an update.
The Care and Support bill is currently trundling through a series of meetings examining clauses prior to the bill being sent to the House of Lords and from there back to the Commons.
As the bill is basically supported by all parties and there is no alternative on the table, it is expected an easy passage to becoming law. This means that the present meetings have a greater import than perhaps they would with a more contentious bill.
The clause most of interest to Cover readers is clause four; the one that lays out the requirements for information and advice both in general and financial terms. A recent meeting hosted in the House of Lords discussed this clause.
These meetings, although open to journalists, are held under the Chatham House rule and are therefore not attributed or reported on directly. However, Cover caught up with Chris Horlick, managing director of care at Partnership, an insurer intimately bound up in the drafting of the Bill, to assess the state of play and put a few points to him.
A viable market?
The first question is obvious. This market is not ready-made, councils will need to refer people for advice and information, and they have no mechanism for this. Those organisations in turn will need a mechanism to refer on if that is needed. So how far are we down the road to a viable market for advisers?
"The Bill is a staged implementation, so April 2015 sees the deferred payment scheme introduced, this is the trigger point for referral to financial advice," said Horlick.
"The scrutiny committee was explicit and said of this that nobody should be offered the deferred payment scheme without referral to regulated financial advice.
"Not everyone is a self-funder and liable to be offered the deferred payment scheme, so we want to capture the rest of them as well. So we need a mechanism for them. Is there one today? No, absolutely not."
Rather surprisingly, the fundamental question of what is information and what is advice has not yet been solved in relation to long-term care funding.
While financial advice is set down in definition through various financial laws and indeed through the FCA, other forms of advice have not actually been fully defined and thus the whole system is at risk of a blurring of boundaries and leakage of information into advice.
Will all financial advice be independent? Horlick noted that we need to be very clear what independent advice means as currently on the face of the bill.
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