Meeting of the Parliament 03 June 2026 [Draft]
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and congratulations on being elected to your post.
As this is my first speech, I will start by thanking the people of West Scotland for electing me. I pledge to serve the people in this role, and I recognise the great privilege that I now have to speak in this chamber. I have come here from working in a village library, and it was the daily stories of people’s struggles in life that made me feel that I needed to do something to be the change that I wanted to see, so here I am.
In the motion for debate, it is acknowledged that the NHS cannot be improved without improving the state of social care. I am sure that, as well as NHS staff, Parliament would like to recognise and commend the social care staff across Scotland’s local authorities and the third sector.
Long ago in the 1990s, in Yorkshire, where I grew up, I worked as a care assistant. That was before minimum wage legislation came in, which happened in the same year as this Parliament was established. The pay was terrible, but back then I could stay at my mum’s. The hours worked well for me, and it was a very rewarding job. One day, I was chatting to the manager of the home that I worked in about the proposals that some politicians were making for a minimum wage. He said that he would love to pay a minimum wage, but he could not afford it. The minimum wage was introduced because paying staff a decent wage is not a luxury—it is basic respect. It enables staff to stay. We cannot all live at our mum’s.
Thirty years later, care workers’ pay is still too low. A lot more of our care workers now go to people’s homes, which enables people to stay in a familiar environment. That is great, but it takes time and requires more expertise than I needed to have as a care assistant in the 90s.
We must ensure that enough time is factored in for workers to travel between homes as well as care for people when they get there. That time is scarce due to understaffing as a result of the UK having to leave the European Union and because the work is badly paid. A lack of staff is making that work more stressful. Many care workers have told me that they cannot provide the care that folk deserve.
We must recognise how things are. It is not good enough just to say that we value those workers. We too often hear folk say that they do not do work that involves caring for others—work that is mainly done by women—for the money. I am afraid that being caring does not pay the bills.
There are people such as my old boss who say that they cannot afford fair pay for care workers, but we need to recognise that care workers do an extremely demanding job delivering excellent care, often in difficult circumstances. We need to ensure that those care workers are paid at least £15 per hour and that they have collective bargaining, secure contracts and better terms and conditions, and we need to ensure that nurses in social care get paid the same as nurses in the NHS.
All that is not just because it is the right way to treat people but because proper pay and respect for care workers will encourage new workers into the care sector, save the public purse money and improve our NHS by enabling people to move out of hospital beds.
Demand on social care services is only going to increase as our population ages. It is necessary that we work with local authorities, the NHS and the third sector to learn from other models of social care such as the Buurtzorg model, developed in the Netherlands, which gives more control and management to care staff and could potentially let us reduce costs without reducing the quality of care.
In order to give us the space to make necessary changes and free up hospital beds, the Scottish Government must provide an immediate funding boost to meet the most pressing needs, and that should include a boost to care workers’ pay. Most importantly, we have to recognise that good social care saves us money.