Meeting of the Parliament 02 November 2022
The Conservative Party might not have given birth to the NHS, but Conservative Government after Conservative Government has nurtured it through good times and bad. That is why, today, in our motion, the Scottish Conservatives call on the SNP to scrap these wasteful plans and put every penny back into front-line social care.
We want to see a local care service that empowers communities. We want a change in culture and a change in delivery at the local level, with a service that is underpinned by a simple commitment to ensure that people access care in their local area, close to their family and close to their support networks. Centralisation poses risks not only to those who work in the care system, but to those who need care and the families that need to be around them.
The national care service poses a very real risk of an increase in cruel, out-of-area care that splits families from loved ones. The SNP falls back on one justification alone—that the reforms will create consistency—despite having no real plan to achieve it.
The only thing that is consistent about a national care service is the opposition to it. There is opposition from councillors, NHS boards, the unions and the workforce, charities, royal colleges and the independent and third sector. There is now opposition from normally supine SNP back benchers. However, there is a way out—the iceberg can be avoided. The SNP can urgently U-turn on a national care service and back our commonsense, local care-driven approach. Unless it does so, once again, overstretched care workers, vulnerable patients and their families will suffer.
I urge colleagues across the Scottish Parliament to support quality local care and to back our motion tonight.
I move,
That the Parliament notes the significant cross-party and cross-sectoral concern about the monumental risks involved in the creation of a National Care Service; warns that the financial memorandum to the Bill estimates that the creation of the service could cost up to £1.3 billion over five years and questions the accuracy of the Scottish Government’s estimates currently before the Parliament; raises concern about the rationale for creating a National Care Service through major structural reform at a time when social care is in crisis; acknowledges the considerable concerns from local government, trades unions and other industry stakeholders about the potential negative impacts of centralisation; believes that better value for money and better patient care will be achieved by directing investment into frontline provision and staffing rather than reorganisation, and calls for the creation of a Local Care Service focussed on better local delivery, underpinned by a local care guarantee.