Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research at Common Weal.
So NOW the Scottish Government wants to talk?
In the wake of Cosla withdrawing its support for the National Care Service Bill, the Scottish Government has called for talks to resolve the dispute and to help get its flawed bill across the line.
The problem is that there’s very little trust left among stakeholders in the care bill – including campaigners like Common Weal. We sympathise with Cosla who were placed in a very difficult position right from the start. Common Weal cannot support the bill in its current form, or even if the Scottish Government’s proposed stage two amendments pass as they currently are. We, too, are forced to say now that the bill needs to be massively overhauled or killed and started again.
The Scottish Government’s initial plan for the National Care Service was to strip all caring responsibilities in the public sector away from local authorities and to place them under the direct control of Scottish ministers. This is the very antithesis of the principles of local democracy and subsidiarity that the Scottish Government is supposed to stand for and would have led to a massive upheaval of staff with huge uncertainty over pay, conditions and pensions.
Needless to say the Government did not extend the same "opportunity" to the private care sector, who would have been left as they are to siphon vast amounts of money into shareholder profits, quite often via tax havens (see Common Weal’s policy paper “Scotland Against PPP” for some examples). Indeed, much of the bill seems to be about making it more efficient to commission care services from those companies than it is about improving care itself.
We’ve been fighting against getting to where we are now since we saw it coming early on. We were core to a campaign to force a pause in the bill so that the NCS could be properly co-designed with stakeholders. Not that this helped.
When the bill came back to Parliament it was essentially unchanged and the largest proposed change to be added was a backroom deal made between the Scottish Government, Cosla and the NHS to run the NCS between the three of them.
The Scottish Government promised amendments to make this and other changes happen but only if the parliament passed stage one of the bill first. They reluctantly did but demanded that the Government publish those amendments sharply.
With the deadline approaching, the Government announced a new expert legislative advisory group to scrutinise the amendments before they were passed to parliament. Instead, the amendments were only handed to us shortly before the final meeting of the group.
Another consultation was announced on those amendments (see Common Weal’s “Fixing the NCS Bill” paper for our response) which has put campaigners in the weird position of trying to scrutinise the actual bill as it currently stands as well as what the bill could be if as-yet hypothetical Government amendments are added, without knowing if any other party in Parliament will try to add their own amendments either to the extant bill or to the possibly amended one.
We know what would need to change in the bill that we could support it passing, but we are now at the point that we do not believe that the Scottish Government is willing to move to that place. The rhetoric from the ministers in the past week has given us the sense that they are looking for the smallest deliverable promise they can make to get their legislation over the line. While that gap remains, we cannot support the bill or the NCS that would be created as a result.
To be clear, while Common Weal is not happy with the bill and we now see very little alternative other than to kill it and start again, we still support the concept of a National Care Service. We will oppose efforts to abandon the NCS entirely as the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives both want to do.
We are also deeply concerned with Labour’s plans as we fear that they will wait and see what Keir Starmer (below) does with care service plans down south (such plans are at an even earlier and more nebulous phase of development than up here, and aren’t likely to be seen in public until after the next UK General Election).
Due to devolution there can’t be a single UK-wide care service, but waiting for England to launch theirs and copying it is an option. Though to do that would be to actively reject with contempt all of the co-design that has been done by stakeholders in Scotland and would result in an even less localised care sector than the Scottish Government’s current centralised plan.
As for the Greens, they seem to still be formulating their own ideas now that they are free to do so after leaving government and may find themselves in a kingmaking position on the fate of the bill. I’d encourage them to read our blueprint Caring for All again and to adopt that as the future of care in Scotland no matter what might happen in the shorter term between then and now.
But as for that short term, I must again address the Scottish Government. “Co-design” up until now has been a process of the Government presenting ideas, being confused when stakeholders don’t like them, then adopting them anyway. That’s what got us into this mess.
Instead, they should read our paper Ready To Fail for a blueprint on how to actually co-design legislation. In short, they need to sit on the other side of the table and rather than talk, they need to listen to what stakeholders have to say and then actually do it. Scotland deserves a National Care Service worthy of the name. The current bill will not deliver one.
