Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)16 February 2021
Monica Lennon made a compelling argument for that, and I do not see a reason why we would not support it, in particular given that, as she rightly said, 83 per cent of the social care workforce are female, so there is gender pay inequality as well.
As well as involving service users, we must harness the creativity and passion of our dedicated care workers. That means affording them the opportunity of effective collective bargaining and giving them a chance to help to shape the service that they provide. That must be built around the essential principle of allowing care services to operate in a way that allows carers to build relationships and trust with care users, moving away from narrow task-based contracts in which individual carers change with alarming and unsettling regularity.
Part of the offer must begin with the scrapping of charges for care services that are delivered at home. By so doing, we can enable more people to stay in their homes if they choose and experience the better outcomes that that can mean.
It is important to recognise that reform of social care should not just cover the profession itself. The measure of our efforts to bring reform will lie in how we recognise the tireless contribution of unpaid carers, giving them better support, respite and the ability to continue to work.
I will draw my opening remarks to a close, but I have more points to make in my summation.
I move amendment S5M-24134.2, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:
“notes the recommendations of the Independent Review of Adult Social Care; agrees with the ambition to enhance adult social care provision across Scotland; believes that centralisation has not delivered the benefits promised for other public services, and the loss of local democratic accountability is a risk to care service users, and calls for the new resources and new human rights approach to social care to be provided through integrated local services, governed locally, involving care users, to national care service standards and entitlements; believes that there should be a new national consensus that social care should be provided on a human rights basis, and that a preventative approach should be championed; notes the concerns of disabled people that previous legislation has not worked sufficiently well to give them a system based on their human rights which allows each individual to achieve their goals; recognises the critical support provided by the social care workforce on a daily basis and believes they must be afforded a nationally agreed and mandatory fair work package on pay, terms of employment and career progression, shaped by care workers and collective bargaining; considers that there should be national care service standards, with the funding put in place to meet those standards, and effective complaint resolution for when they are not met; calls for national standards and local commissioning to involve disabled people and other care users, and be informed by local experience of unmet needs, as highlighted by the independent review; believes that charges for care services delivered at home should be scrapped; calls for unpaid carers to receive better support and respite in recognition that their role is critically important, and considers that these step changes, described by the independent review, are key to improving the quality of life for social care users, and that implementation should begin now and not be delayed by a need to create new organisations to deliver it.”
Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.