The creation of a national care service should have been one of the most important policies of the current parliamentary term.
The NCS is meant to replace a fragmented system rooted in low pay and replace it with a national system for the care of our older citizens. Driving up standards in social care and harmonising staff terms and conditions are long overdue and the NCS seemed to be the solution.
It has been described as the biggest public-sector reform in Scotland since the NHS was created after WWII. But scrutiny of the Bill underpinning the plan has revealed major difficulties. Holyrood’s finance committee said they had “significant concerns” about the lack of detailed costs.
