Meeting of the Parliament 14 November 2018
I thank Labour for bringing this debate to the chamber and I welcome the opportunity to discuss the future of social care in Scotland. I am heartened by the progress that is being made to make personal care and nursing care free to all who need it, regardless of age or condition. It was deeply unfair that free care was limited by age, and I believe that the change was won because the Government listened to voices across parties, constituencies and communities. We all understand how integral high-quality social care is to our entire health and social care system, and that should be reflected in housing and our fair work practices, too.
I hope that this debate allows us to make further progress in agreeing shared priorities for social care. No discussion of care should fail to recognise the incredible contribution that unpaid carers make. Health and social care budgets are stretched, and we can only imagine how much worse that would be without that incredible contribution, which we should better recognise through a more generous and more widely available Scottish carers allowance.
I turn to pay. I whole-heartedly agree with the point that was made in Labour’s motion that there is still a disparity between the value of social care to society and the level of pay and working conditions of staff. Investment that the Scottish Government has made in the living wage for social care workers has been welcome, although clearly there are problems and not all workers are receiving that yet.
We cannot and must not stop there. The Scottish Greens have long called for a living wage plus for social care staff. A rate of at least £10 per hour for social care staff would reflect how important their work is to our communities and public services and show our high regard for the specialised caring role. Such investment would significantly boost women’s pay, given that women account for about 85 per cent of the social services workforce.
I would also like the Scottish Government to commit resources to the delivery of meaningful pay differentials among staff who are building careers in the sector. Such direct support would encourage staff to develop into specialised, senior and management roles, with increased responsibility.
Such an approach would also help to address the serious staff shortages and high turnover in the sector. Scottish Care indicates that average turnover in care homes is 22 per cent. As Age Scotland points out, that is likely to be compounded by Brexit, given that at least 6 per cent of our social care staff are European Economic Area nationals, as are around 8 per cent of nurses in the sector.
Given that more European Union nurses are leaving the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s United Kingdom register than are joining it, enough damage has been done already. The British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing are campaigning for a people’s vote, and in the light of Labour’s motion on social care, I urge members on that party’s benches to join in that campaign.
To ensure that social care services are sustainable, an increase in resources is necessary, as well as efforts to safeguard existing staffing levels in the face of Brexit and to improve workforce planning, but there does not yet seem to be a strong consensus on how increased resources should be directed to front-line social care services. The motion calls on the Government to develop a financial model to address the issue in partnership with local government and NHS boards, and it is fair to recognise that the Government has work under way in that regard—Audit Scotland has welcomed the medium-term financial framework for health and social care.
The Greens will support the Labour motion, but I point out that, in “Scotland’s Budget Report 2018”, the Fraser of Allander institute stresses that
“Spending choices should not just be viewed as a trade-off between local government and health”.
When the aim of integration is for spending on health and spending on social care to be mutually supportive, we must move away from considering one budget to be protected at the expense of the other. Both need to be properly funded.
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