Meeting of the Parliament 27 November 2024
It is a pleasure to support the motion.
The cabinet secretary is right to highlight the fact that the national care service, or its concept, is essential for the future of Scotland. Social care is so critical to all aspects of our civic society that most families in Scotland will have experience of care requirements in their own households. Therefore, it is essential that we get this right. Unfortunately, it seems that no good idea can survive contact with the calamity of this Government’s administration of it.
Time and again, all parties have offered good will to the Government in an effort to get the bill right. Numerous months have been spent in committee trying to support the Government to get the bill right, but we have ended up in a position in which key stakeholders across local government, the trade unions and the social enterprise sector have withdrawn their support. That is a disastrous performance by the Government, and it should be reflecting on it with humility instead of simply trying to deny reality.
The commitment to establish a national care service was made by the Scottish National Party Government in 2021, in the wake of the pandemic, but, in the three years since then, £30 million of public expenditure has delivered precisely nothing of any real value to the people of Scotland. We are no further forward, and the crushing issues in the social care sector persist: rising delayed discharge rates in the national health service, low pay, poor working conditions and a lack of choice and agency for people who receive and provide care.
In pursuing the bill, the Scottish Government has tried and failed to be all things to all people. It has lacked decisiveness, grit and a vision of what the national care service should look like. It should have learned the right lessons from the creation of the national health service. When Aneurin Bevan steered that legislation through the UK Parliament, it was not some immaculate conception; there was immense challenge and dispute around the creation of the NHS. It took grit, determination and a decision on what it would be—it would not happen in local government or in privatised hospitals but would be a national service. At least, at that time, the Government made a decision; the minister, the cabinet secretary and the Scottish Government have not had the gumption to do that on this occasion.