Meeting of the Parliament 03 December 2025
Across Scotland, social care is in crisis, and nowhere is that clearer than in my home city of Glasgow. Day in and day out, I hear from families, unpaid carers, care workers and members of community organisations who are simply exhausted. They are doing everything that they can, but they are being failed by a system that is underfunded, overstretched and increasingly unsafe.
Glasgow’s social care system is not just creaking—it is breaking. Local authorities are struggling with unprecedented pressures. The Accounts Commission has already warned that councils face a £650 million black hole, which is being driven in large part by rising social care costs. In the past five years, Glasgow City Council alone has spent almost £100 million on overtime and agency staff simply to keep services afloat. That is not a sustainable workforce model—it is a crisis response that is becoming the norm.
Charities know that, too. Two hundred and forty organisations, including Age Scotland and Alzheimer Scotland, have already warned the First Minister that the sector has been “pushed to breaking point”. Those words were not used lightly.
However, instead of fixing those problems, the SNP Government ploughed ahead with its disastrous national care service and spent £30 million on a plan that everyone told it would not work, before being forced into a humiliating climbdown. That £30 million could have delivered 1 million hours of care or paid for 1,200 care workers. Instead, it was just squandered.
While ministers wasted years on an unworkable centralisation project, the real issues were left to spiral. In Glasgow, we are seeing the consequences every single week. Older people are waiting months for basic care assessments, and families are begging for care-at-home packages that simply do not exist. Carers have told me that they are leaving the profession because they cannot cope with the pressure, the hours or the pay. Charities have told me that they are using reserves just to stay open, and 67 per cent of not-for-profit providers have said that they will not survive for more than four years without change.
We are not talking about a functioning social care system. We are talking about a system that is held together by overstretched staff and unpaid carers, the majority of whom are women, who are being pushed well beyond breaking point.
Glasgow deserves better than that. Our city has one of the highest levels of health inequality in the whole of the UK. We have an ageing population and a growing number of people who are living with long-term conditions. Those pressures are not going away, but the support to address them has gone away.
If the Government was serious about improving social care, it would start by listening, not to consultants or central Government committees, but to the workers on the ground: the carers, the nurses, the home support teams and the charities and volunteers who keep Glasgow going every single day. It would listen to the families who tell us that they are at breaking point. They are tired of being passed from pillar to post and tired of hearing promises while their loved ones have to wait for months for help that should be available within days.
Labour’s motion rightly highlights the scale of the crisis, but we need more than warm words. We need the Government to finally admit that its approach has failed and that the people of Scotland cannot wait any longer for meaningful action.
I say to the ministers: stop wasting money; stop defending the indefensible; start funding local care properly; start valuing care workers as the essential professionals they are; and start treating Glasgow’s vulnerable people with the dignity and urgency that they deserve.
Glasgow’s social care crisis is not abstract—it is real, it is immediate and it is harming people right now. The Government must finally get serious about putting it right.