The Scottish Government has published responses submitted to the National Care Service consultation.
The Scottish Socialist Party submitted its call for a publicly-owned, publicly-funded National Care Service, which delivers care on the basis of need free at the point of use, and which ensures a better deal for care workers.
69% of people support a National Care Service in Scotland which is wholly publicly owned and publicly funded – including 79% of women aged 40-65. Scotland’s care needs are only going to continue to grow and grow; we need a system of social care that is able to meet those needs.
You can read the SSP’s response to the National Care Service consultation HERE
Care Crisis, COVID Catastrophe
Since last year’s national consultation, the true state of the care crisis has been revealed. The Scottish Government cannot ignore the care crisis any longer.
209,690 workers – mostly women – are facing unacceptable and unsustainable pressure in unfair conditions. Audit Scotland has revealed that almost a quarter of care workers leave within three months over low pay, poor conditions, and overwork.
A fifth of care workers do not have permanent contracts; one in ten are on zero-hour contracts. Carers are paid as little as £10.50 an hour.
Three out of every four care workers report having to carry out unpaid training on their own time.
Despite this crisis in care, in May 2020, the SNP and the Tories worked together to shut down collective bargaining for private care workers – siding with each other, and with private profiteering, over workers yet again.
Poverty pay conditions have created a recruitment crisis in care, and are impacting care quality. Three-quarters of care workers report that they do not have adequate time to deliver a suitable standard of care to service users – and Age UK estimates that 1.5 million people in Britain don’t get the care they need.
One in seven service users in Britain pays more than £100,000 per year in care costs. Almost 80% of that adult social care provision is provided by ‘for-profit’ companies who take a significant proportion of money out of the public purse and distribute it to shareholders around the world, rather than to care workers and service quality.
Care homes spend, on average, just £6 per day on food per resident. The average weekly care home fees in Scotland are over £600 for residential care and more than £800 for nursing care. Many service users are required to sell their home, plunder their assets, or rely on family “top-ups” to fund care.
The public already pays the bill for private care through care fees, public grants, social security spending, personal debt, and corporate tax loopholes. Scotland’s big private care firms move money taken from the NHS, local councils, and residents to secret tax havens. £1.5bn “leaks” out of the care system through tax haven scams and into private hands every year.
According to the Competition and Markets Authority, the care home industry was worth £16bn in 2018 with 5,500 different providers operating 11,300 homes and 456,000 beds for older people. Yet, as Professor Alyson Pollock has pointed out, “it is virtually impossible to track where that public money is going”.
Large private care providers hide profit, and therefore pay less tax, by paying rent to subsidiary companies in the same corporate network, but which are based in tax havens. Care homes are subsequently underfunded and underresourced.
As a result, historic staffing issues and poor working conditions contributed significantly to the COVID-19 catastrophe experienced in Scotland’s care homes, which the Common Weal think-tank identified as “the single greatest failure in devolved government since the creation of the Scottish Parliament”.
Recklessly transferring elderly patients from hospitals into under-resourced care homes – combined with a lack of PPE, lack of testing, lack of adequate sick pay, and a lack of staff – proved to be disastrous. The Feeley Report concluded that “our care homes were simply not fit to withstand what befell them” during the pandemic.
National Care Service
The Scottish and UK Government proposals for reforming social care simply do not go anywhere near far enough. The “National Care Service” proposed by the Scottish Government is nothing of the sort.
The Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care claims to believe that “social care services, just like health care services, should be provided on a truly universal basis”. But the SNP’s plan doesn’t do anything of the kind. Current provision is not “universal”; is almost entirely private, discriminates against those without the money to pay for it themselves, and often charges those who can more than £100,000 per year.
The Scottish Government has earmarked a mere £146 million for “bureaucratic window dressing” that will not alleviate the staffing crisis in care, deliver a single minute of care, or bring down care costs for service users.
The Scottish Socialist Party knows that private profiteering in care fatally compromises care quality and working conditions. There are 1,100 care home providers whose fiduciary responsibility to shareholders outweighs the wider public interest. Retaining private ownership and provision of care is fundamentally incompatible with Scotland’s urgent and growing care needs.
Instead, the SSP supports a National Care Service which is publicly owned and publicly funded, with care provided on the basis of need free at the point of use – just like our NHS.
We can afford a publicly-owned, publicly-funded National Care Service that delivers care free at the point of need. In fact – with an aging population that is living longer, a permanent recruitment crisis in private care, and growing inequality that will leave future generations less able to pay high private care costs – we simply cannot afford anything less.
The SSP supports care workers and their unions in fighting for a minimum rate of £15 per hour. The SSP also campaigns for a national minimum wage at two-thirds of the male median earnings – rising with inflation, for every worker over 16 – and an end to the use of low and zero-hour contracts.
Workers who cannot afford to be off sick are more likely to get sick and are more likely to spread illnesses. No one should have to choose between their wages and public health. The SSP is calling for full average wages for sick and self-isolating workers.
The SSP knows that care is a skilled profession and that the exploitative culture around care fails to recognise that. Instead, we need a cultural shift that recognises care for the highly skilled and dedicated profession that it is, improves career-long conditions, and increases lifelong training and learning opportunities for young workers.