THE Oxford Mail has recently published letters from councillors Sarah Hutchinson and John Tanner taking issue with your The Issue column (Mail, February 18) in which I highlighted major problems posed to the county council by the Personal Care at Home Bill.

This Government Bill was conjured up by Gordon Brown for his speech to the Labour Party Conference last autumn as an electoral ‘sweetie’.

It had received no consultation, and civil servants had done no calculations for its cost. What’s more, it ran counter to the Green Paper on future funding of care, published just a few months previously, which had wide consultation nationally.

When details of the Personal Care at Home Bill eventually emerged, the Government made clear that it would fund only a maximum of £420m of a total estimated cost of £670m with local authorities expected to pay the remaining £250m out of efficiency savings which, in many cases, had been dedicated already to paying for pressures such as care for increasing numbers of very elderly people.

Should £670m be inadequate, then local authorities would carry the whole risk of finding additional money.

On two counts this new duty for local authorities is unprecedented.

Firstly, under the New Burdens Doctrine, to which the Government is supposedly committed, all new government burdens on local Government are meant to be fully funded.

Secondly, the Government has never previously sought to pre-empt the spending of efficiency savings which had already been earmarked to meet pressures identified by councils.

The Government has also demanded that this major change in the provision of social care should be implemented by October 1, even though it doesn’t intend to issue guidance on implementation until June or July, leaving almost no time (through the high summer holiday period) to retrain thousands of social workers and to adjust computer systems.

Mr Tanner says my calculations do not up. They are not my calculations. They are the calculations of the independent Association of Directors of Social Services (ADASS), worked out from returns from 61 directors – and they show that the real costs of the bill will be at least £1,000m. This will mean councils having to find £580m rather than the £250m suggested by the Government.

On the basis of these more credible ADASS figures, I joined 78 other cabinet/executive members for adult social services in writing to The Times to ask the Government to rethink this dog’s dinner of a bill.

Included among the signatories were portfolio holders from Labour-held councils until the Labour politburo demanded their removal in a clumsy piece of dictat.

Ms Hutchinson offers the facile suggestion that a Conservative administration should abandon its proposal to ease the impost of inheritance tax in order to pay for this half-baked bill. But that seems to miss the point totally.

If the Government had thought that care for those in greatest need should be provided free, it would have enacted such a proposal a long time ago and not in the run-up to a General Election. The Personal Care at Home Bill is truly the legacy of an incompetent Prime Minister and his apology of an administration in its death throes.

Jim Couchman Cabinet Member for Adult Services Oxfordshire County Council