Meeting of the Parliament 29 February 2024
I declare that I am in receipt of social care.
In many ways, politics should be about prudence. One philosopher famously said that he prefers
“the actual to the possible”.
That is a much better philosophy for conducting our politics than aiming for something that may seem good in principle but would crumble in practice. We owe it to individuals, carers and taxpayers to be prudent when making policy, which is why I am in favour of reforming our current social care system rather than building something completely new. We must acknowledge that the respondents to the consultation on the bill have real concerns about social care, and we must listen to their lived experience. To diminish their experiences would be very wrong. However, that does not mean that the only way forward is wholesale change.
We all want a more efficient social care system in Scotland, but the underlying issues will not be addressed by structural change alone. Consultation responses show that the main difficulties in social care are challenges such as finding sustainable funding and hanging on to good staff. Those kinds of problems will remain, regardless of whether a national care service is implemented. Until we address the root issues, it would be much better to target those problems and reform what we have, rather than undergoing a complete overhaul.
The bill does not honour either those who receive social care or those who work in social care. It lacks essential detail, which makes our jobs very hard, as the policies are impossible to scrutinise properly. Key specifics of the bill rest on secondary legislation. We cannot know what the bill will mean for people living their lives, today and in the future. For example, there is no explanation of how the bill will affect relationships with existing local social care structures, or for how a national care service could be equipped to respond to local concerns. In addition, areas such as data, employment implications and individual rights and responsibilities are all left completely to secondary legislation. Those are hugely important areas that should be addressed in primary legislation in order to guarantee full parliamentary scrutiny. Securing those details in primary legislation would not diminish the ability to be responsive and flexible during secondary legislation. However, it would give us as parliamentarians and those who we represent confidence that the bill has the appropriate, required powers.
Social care cannot wait for the national care service; decisions need to be made now—it is too important. The bill as it is presented is distracting us from solving the real problems that we have that people such as myself and others across Scotland live with, day in and day out.
Nor does the bill guarantee meaningful accountability from Government ministers. There is no provision on how the principles underlying the national care service will be monitored, evaluated or enforced. Section 2(2) of the bill says:
“Everything that the Scottish Ministers do in discharging that duty is to be done in the way that seems to them”—
I emphasise the words “to them”—
“to best reflect the National Care Service principles.”
Ministers will therefore become judge and jury.
It is even more important that there be effective metrics for success. I am not convinced that a centralised service will provide better care than is currently offered locally. A centralised body cannot know the exact situation of every community in Scotland. We live in a diverse country, with diverse needs. The concerns of care workers and people who need care will be very different depending on where they live in the country. The situation cannot be the same up in the north of Scotland as it is here in the central belt. The issues for those of us with rural constituencies will be different from those for members who represent urban constituents.
There is no value for money for the taxpayer in the bill. The effect of centralising social care is that organisational and administration costs will balloon and become much more unwieldy than they are currently. The result will be a dramatic increase in bureaucracy, which will do nothing for efficiency and, crucially, will do nothing for those who need or who provide care. Those funds would be better off going to social care workers on the front line instead of going into a bottomless pit of bureaucracy.
I will not support the bill at stage 1. It does not tackle the current challenges in social care effectively. It is an enabling bill, but it does not provide the level of detail that is required to stand up to parliamentary scrutiny. There is no provision in it for accountability; matters are left to the subjective judgment of Government ministers. Finally, the bill will not give taxpayers value for money.
16:22