Meeting of the Parliament 26 April 2017
I thank the Greens for bringing the issue to Parliament, because it is important that we discuss social care and carers. It is an issue that affects people directly and which will continue to impact on them when the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 comes into force next year.
One in six of Scotland’s population is an unpaid carer. There are 759,000 adult carers and 29,000 young carers. In 20 years’ time there could be 1 million carers in Scotland. Those are extraordinary statistics.
Carers do what they do not for money but for love. There might be many of us in the chamber who are carers, or who become carers, know a carer or need a carer at some point in our lives. It is important that the selfless people who look after others are given the rights and entitlements that flow from the act, such as the right to support if they qualify for it.
It is vital that sufficient resources are available to implement the new duties fully. The problem is that we do not know with any degree of certainty what that will cost. What we can be certain of is that the majority of costs—94 per cent—will fall on councils, which, as most of us know, have seen year-on-year cuts in their budget from the Scottish Government.
I will first talk about the broad financial scenario around social care before I come back to carers themselves. Audit Scotland said last year that current approaches to delivering social work services will not be sustainable in the long term. There is a clear risk that reducing costs further could affect the quality of services. It is pretty obvious that if the SNP squeeze on councils continues, some could simply change the rules on eligibility to make sure that fewer carers qualify for help. A well-meaning act of this Parliament could end up causing a worse situation.