Hansard

I am pleased to take part in a debate that raises these important issues. The Scottish Government’s vision of a healthier, fairer and wealthier Scotland places at its heart a preventative, person-centred and community-led approach to improving people’s lives. I am sure that members agree that all our citizens, including children and young people, deserve good-quality and efficient health and social care services. However, we are aware of the challenges. People living longer is a success story, but as the population ages, the scale and complexity of demand for health and social care support is growing. Those changes mean that it is not sustainable to deliver services in the same way as has been done in the past. Radical service redesign, including the integration of health and social care, is required to meet the challenges.

It is not just the ageing population that presents a challenge. Some 47 per cent of unpaid carers in the most deprived areas of Scotland care for 35 hours a week or more. If carers are not appropriately supported, such high-intensity caring can lead to increased social isolation and add to pressures on both the carer’s finances and their health and wellbeing. It is clear to me that we must do more towards tackling the inequalities that are experienced by carers in those areas, while supporting the whole population with their health and social care needs.

Against the background of those challenges, we are continuing to make progress in improving the fairness of the system of charging for social care. Most recently, we have provided local authorities with £5 million to enable them to exempt veterans war pension payments from social care financial assessments from 1 April this year. Our next step is to undertake a feasibility study into the extension of free personal care to those who are under 65, building on the calls for Frank’s law. I, too, pay tribute to the work of Amanda Kopel and others. Alison Johnstone asked for an update, and I note that discussions are under way. Indeed, officials will meet the Scotland against the care tax campaign next week as part of a wider engagement with stakeholders as we take that work forward.

We have already raised the threshold for charging, which we estimated would result in around 15,000 people paying fewer charges or being taken out of charging completely. As Alison Johnstone said, we have also ended charging for those who are terminally ill in the last six months of life.

This is a busy week for social security. Tomorrow, the Minister for Social Security will make an announcement to the Parliament on the Scottish social security agency, but today the focus is on carers, and rightly so. We are already committed to increasing carers allowance to the same level as jobseekers allowance. Over recent months, we have heard directly from carers, including young carers, about their day-to-day challenges and their experiences of social security. Some are well supported, but others face challenges to their health and wellbeing and indeed their education.

I want to see a Scotland where all our young people, including young carers, can reach their full potential. The Government is happy to work with any social security ideas that will improve the lot of the people of Scotland. I am pleased to report that we are making good progress in our commitment, which was initiated by the Scottish Green Party, to explore the introduction of a young carers allowance for young people with significant caring responsibilities. Officials across Government have engaged with a wide range of representative organisations to identify gaps and opportunities in the current support landscape for young carers.

As the Parliament will be aware, the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016, which will come into force next April, establishes new duties to provide support and information to adult carers and young carers. New adult carer support plans and young carer statements will capture the support needs of carers, helping them to realise their personal outcomes, ensuring that they can continue to care if they so wish and helping to improve their own health and wellbeing. That will depend on meaningful conversations with carers of all ages. It is our ambition that children and young people be better supported to help to realise their own aspirations, including in work or education.

The 2016 act sits not in isolation but within the wider health and social care landscape. The new integrated health and social care partnerships are responsible for managing more than £8 billion of resources that NHS boards and local authorities previously managed separately. The planning, designing and commissioning of services in a more integrated way from a single budget allows partnerships to take a more joined-up approach, enabling resources to be shifted, based on local priorities, to target preventative activity.

In the coming year, almost £0.5 billion of additional investment in social care and integration will be transferred from the NHS. We will continue to shift the balance of care by increasing the share of the NHS budget that is dedicated to primary, community and social care in every year of the current session of Parliament.

Within the resource that the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Constitution has announced for 2017-18, we have made available £100 million to support sustainability in the care sector and the continued delivery of the living wage. That continued investment enables the real living wage, as set by the independent Living Wage Foundation, to be paid on a full-year basis and at the new rate of £8.45 an hour from next week, and it will give up to 40,000 people a well-deserved pay rise. Those people, who are mainly women, do some of the most valuable work in Scotland.

As announced last month, we will provide local authorities with additional funding to extend payment of the living wage to all childcare staff who deliver the funded early learning and childcare entitlement from the full roll-out of 1,140 hours in 2020. Up to 8,000 staff in the private and third sectors will benefit from that uplift.

That helps us to continue our work in raising the status and image of social care as a profession and to help attract and retain the right people, which are central to our vision for social services in Scotland. We all agree that that is of vital importance, particularly in the context of the challenges posed by the prospect of Brexit. We know that if Scotland loses access to the single market due to Brexit—and, with it, freedom of movement—that could pose a serious recruitment challenge for social care.