I wish to pick up on a couple of points made by the hon. Lady and to ask a question of the Minister. Deferred payment is fundamentally about  having a mechanism that avoids the family facing the trauma of a fire sale of the property at the moment of crisis. Having a deferred payment gives that peace of mind of knowing that is not something they have to address at that point.

It also ensures that the property is not sold at a point when everything else is going on, potentially at a lower price than it would achieve if properly marketed over time. It is an important protection of the asset, but a much more important protection of the emotional crisis that a family is in at the point at which this takes place. That is the best way to understand what deferred payment should be about.

It was great that the previous Government, with one of the few things it did following the recommendations of the Royal Commission on long-term care, sought to introduce deferred payments. What is great about this Government and their determination to see it through is that they have legislated and made it a mandatory requirement that they are delivered. They were never mandatory. As the hon. Lady said, because of that many local authorities had them, paid lip service to them, but did not deliver them, and they were highly variable. This is a good step by the Government.

The other reason that deferred payment is important goes to a point made by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley about reassessments being done in a timely fashion. Someone who has a crisis, who is a self-funder and admitted from a hospital into a nursing home, may recover social function and function, but because they are a self-funder that all too often becomes invisible, and they live for years in that home spending a large amount of money on their nursing home fees, and as a consequence they fall back on the state because they have spent everything they have.

Deferred payment also provides the breathing space to allow those things to be sorted through and provide assurance. There is an issue there about how this can be exploited in a proactive way to achieve another public policy goal, which is to spend money where it most has effect. That is about helping people recover, not helping people increase their dependency.

We have already debated clause 4 but it is relevant to this clause. Clause 4(3)(a) states that local authorities must identify the people

“who would be likely to benefit from financial advice”.

I want to press the Minister on the point about regulated financial advice and seek further clarification on how he envisages the guidance being crafted so as to ensure that local authorities do bear that in mind. There is a huge reputational risk for local authorities and a huge risk to the individual. I was in this House when misinformation around the state earnings-related pension came to light. As a consequence, the then Government had to sort out and compensate many people who had been told effectively to opt out of the state earnings-related pension and were in a less advantageous state as a result.

My fear is that, unless an individual has had the benefit of regulated financial advice, what will come back to haunt either the Government of the day or certainly the local authority in question is that they did not act diligently, and did not fulfil their duty of care and ensure that the individual received the right advice.  In some ways, this product mimics equity release, which is why it should be treated as a financial product for the purposes of regulated financial advice.