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Meeting of the Parliament 15 September 2011

15 Sep 2011 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Social Care Services (Procurement)

Fee, Mary Lab West Scotland Watch on SPTV

I welcome the staff of Quarriers who are sitting in the gallery. I ask the First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Cities Strategy to speak to them today after First Minister’s questions about the impact that social care procurement has on the lives of the staff and the service users to whom they provide excellent care, and to step in to help everyone who is involved in the current pay and conditions dispute between the management and Unison. Those people represent the damage that is being done to our social care services throughout Scotland.

As many members know, I have been very vocal on the situation that the Quarriers staff and service users face. I understand the financial pressures that are forced on the organisation by local authorities, but I cannot stand back and allow the staff to bear the brunt of cost cutting that procurement has led to.

Like many others in the chamber, I strongly believe that local authorities have been using the procurement process to lower costs, and that there has been little focus on quality of care when services are retendered. Social care services provide essential care to the most vulnerable people in Scotland, and they require well-trained and qualified staff. Such services are a lifeline to many in society, and must not be provided on the cheap.

I will give members an example of how cuts to the third sector are harming the care of the elderly, the disabled and the vulnerable. This case, which was brought to my attention by Epilepsy Scotland, involves a young girl who is legally blind with no verbal capacity and has two or three full-blown seizures every night. She was formerly receiving weekly support, and is cared for by her mother while her father serves in Afghanistan. Her funding and care were not renewed, and the choices support was withdrawn.

That has had a huge detrimental impact not only on the girl’s wellbeing and care, but on her mother, who is a full-time carer with no respite. SNP members will howl and moan when I say that the problems of the economy and budgets were not caused by that young girl or other service users like her, but local authorities should be ashamed of the treatment of service users and the third sector as they cut budgets throughout Scotland.

The procurement process has its merits, but its advantages are being exploited to bring cuts to social care. When a local authority believes that care is insufficient, it is right to retender that service, but retendering is being done to cut costs. If we continue to retender services—particularly those that provide the greatest level of care—we will have a system that forces the third sector to its knees and in which competition is less about care and more about how low we can go. That will be a race to the bottom.

I call on the Scottish Government to introduce a minimum five-year term for social care contracts that are well funded, allow the organisations involved to plan for the longer term and give employees job security. Increasing the terms of contracts is essential for the stability of organisations such as Quarriers and for the quality of services that our vulnerable service users deserve.

Local authorities must consult the third sector and trade unions more to deliver a clear procurement system that has care—not cost—at its heart. A distinct approach must be taken—that can be done by consulting other bodies.

In previous years, many organisations in the third sector have taken massive steps to survive.

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Meeting of the Parliament 15 September 2011

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