Meeting of the Parliament 08 February 2023
The national care service will not be free at the point of use—care homes will still charge millions of pounds to users. The national care service will not be run by the state—many of the providers will be private. The national care service is uncosted, ill defined and half-baked. Therefore, equating the proposed national care service with the national health service is an insult to all those nurses, doctors and staff who have worked in the NHS since its inception. The project is a charade dressed up as a revolution.
The SNP is no founder of a great new future. It is nothing like the people who built the NHS following the second world war. Kevin Stewart is no William Beveridge and he is certainly no Nye Bevan—Kevin Bevan, perhaps, but not Nye.
We should be able to agree that the social care service is in crisis—Jackie Baillie is right: it is in crisis now and it cannot wait until 2026 for an answer from this Government. Thousands of people are stuck in hospital every day, in interim beds, or are waiting at home for a care package.
There is an exodus of staff from the sector for jobs in places such as Aldi supermarkets, which pay staff more for stacking shelves than the Government pays staff in care homes and the social care sector. Staff vacancies are sky high—Alex Cole-Hamilton referred to a 47 per cent vacancy rate—and the effect backs up into hospital wards, A and E units and ambulances, because patients have nowhere to go.
The SNP grasps on to Brexit, as Christine Grahame did. Yes, of course, Brexit has contributed, but to point only to Brexit is to ignore the failings of this Government for years on end, because the situation has been building for years. Staff have been taken for granted and underpaid by this Government for years. The minister said that his Government pays care staff more than the Conservatives do in England, but he set a low bar on the ambition for the care service in Scotland when he compared it against the dizzy heights of the Conservatives.
The minister also said that the proposals to increase pay for social care staff would cost £300 million or so, or perhaps the equivalent of one ferry—you never know. However, the staff, who did their bit during the pandemic, are now scunnered, knackered and exhausted.
Gillian Mackay rightly talked about young carers, but absolutely nothing of what she said is guaranteed with the national care service. It is the ambition, but it is not guaranteed. What she mentioned is as possible under the current system as it would be under the future system.
The national care service abandons any notion of integration. At present, integration joint boards and health and social care partnerships attempt to combine the work of health and social care into one organisation at a local level, but the plan abandons all of that. It rips up those local partnerships and creates a new national care service silo. [Interruption.]