Meeting of the Parliament 02 November 2022
I am pleased to rise for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, and I am grateful to Craig Hoy for securing the debate.
Words matter. What we call things matters. In the nomenclature around the national care service, the Government has sought to dress it up as our most treasured national possession. It is small wonder, then, that the public response has been to regard it as a mirror image of that thing that they, and we all, hold so close, but it is anything but that. The NHS was forged out of the rubble and poverty of war. It is free at the point of delivery. Nothing of that is emulated in the proposed national care service. The Liberal Democrats have made no secret of our opposition to the plans from the very start.
The SNP-Green Government has stood and watched the disintegration of our health and social care sector—this is on their watch. Instead of taking the immediate action that is so desperately needed across the sector, it has responded with an ill-fated, bureaucratic exercise, which is already turning into a mess.
Even I am surprised at how quickly the wheels have come off the wagon. Already, legal experts, auditors and council officials have slammed Government plans. This week, the chief executive of East Ayrshire Council said that local authority leaders
“have no certainty ... on what services are going to look like in the next three to four years”,
and he described the current circumstances as “truly unstable” for social work and social care.
As we have already heard, at this week’s Finance and Public Administration Committee meeting, officials described uncertainty about how much the plans would cost, and there was a suggestion that the cost could spiral beyond the Government’s estimate of £1.3 billion.
The alarm has even been raised from within the SNP’s ranks—we have heard something of that this afternoon—in a rare act of dissent among the collective, although that is becoming a little more common these days.