Meeting of the Parliament 03 June 2026 [Draft]
My speech today will be limited to social care due to the scale of what we are talking about. I start by thanking all the NHS staff, local authority staff and those in the third sector for all their hard work over many years to provide care and kindness to the most vulnerable citizens in our society.
I also welcome the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Care to her position and thank her for recognising the need for reform and renewal and for lodging this motion. There is a temptation with such motions to ask whether the phrase “reform”—and we really like reform—is an acknowledgement of all the Government’s failures over the years, but I will not do that. My aim today is not to campaign against the Government but instead to identify areas in the social care system in which there are significant shortfalls, so that collaborative work on renewal and reform can begin across all parties.
My experience of the social care system is lived experience. My oldest son has learning difficulties, which has given me many opportunities to work with many different organisations and understand the areas in which our social care system does and does not work from an end-user perspective. A few years ago, my partner and I became kinship carers. For those of you who are not familiar with kinship care, it is when social services place a child with somebody who the child already knows: a grandparent, auntie, uncle or friend—in our case, the child was my daughter’s friend. Such children generally get very good results when they go on into further life. Our cared-for person has now grown up, and she has a house of her own.
Those experiences led me to sit on West Dunbartonshire health and social care partnership board. Every local authority has such a board, and it is the subject on which I want to start. Some members might have sat on such a board, and others might not have done. Every board should have an unpaid carers rep, which was my position. Support for those representatives is provided by the Coalition of Carers in Scotland, to which I pay a special thank you for all its efforts to support unpaid carers over the years. Our current system for delivering social care is devolved to each individual local authority, which means that when we consider reform and look at the picture across the whole of Scotland, we see that it is very fragmented. Some boards deliver services very well, and others do not, but we must acknowledge that service delivery takes very different forms across Scotland.
We also need to acknowledge that every health board across Scotland is really struggling to deliver basic services. Health and social care partnership board meetings have largely become showcases for cuts on top of cuts, so being a board member can sometimes be really depressing.
In trying to justify everything that I have said, I will use the example of the care at home service. In West Dunbartonshire, the service is particularly poor at the moment. Allocated time slots for carers have been reduced to seven minutes. Many local authorities across Scotland have reduced their time slots to 10 minutes. Does the cabinet secretary agree that such incredibly short visits are completely inappropriate? The Scottish Government must consider legislation that would introduce statutory time allocations.