Solve the crisis in social care to save the NHS

The crisis in social care means delays freeing up hospital beds (Photo: Adobe)

So why are people waiting so long? Overwhelmed staff keep telling us that they don’t have the beds they need to discharge patients into. And why are there no hospital beds for A&E staff to send people to? Because of gaps and shortages in social care, which constitutes a crisis in and of itself.

All too often, social care is regarded as an afterthought, as a kind of second cousin in our health service. But in truth, social care is an inextricable part of our NHS. Social care is the stairlift your grandmother needs installed at home before she can leave hospital. It’s the care home for which your elderly dad has been put on a waiting list. It’s the nursing staff who come to look after your disabled brother and help him out with daily tasks.

In other words, it’s the backbone preventing other parts of our health service from being overwhelmed. But right now, there are massive gaps in that critical support, which means thousands of people are stuck in hospital. Staff can’t receive new patients swiftly, waits at A&E go through the roof and everyone is delayed in getting the help they need.

In 2022, the SNP announced that they would try to fix this with a monstrously bureaucratic ministerial takeover of social care services. This would have seen decisions over care packages taken by SNP ministers rather than by local health and care boards as they are now.

In an effort to cash in on public goodwill towards our NHS, the SNP called their proposals the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. But after wasting four years and £30 million on this power grab, they have now been forced to junk their centralisation plan. That £30m could have paid the salaries of 1200 care workers. The hollowed-out bill now in front of parliament is very different. It contains a handful of small but sensible changes that broadly all parties agree on. It’s not much but it is a start. It still, however, retains its former name.

My party want the government to drop the title “national care service” from the name of the bill, as this is the very part of the legislation they have had to ditch. It’s misleading and simply a government attempt to save face. With the ongoing crisis in social care, I want to see it renamed the Care and Carers Bill, reflecting what my party see as the priorities for this legislation.

Care goes to the heart of our values as a party. It was Liberal Democrats who introduced free personal care in Scotland, enshrined the right to carer’s leave in employment law, secured a change to enable family carers to earn more and won millions more for college programmes to train up care workers.

And we want to go much further. We would create a new Carer’s Minimum Wage, boosting the minimum wage for care workers by £2 an hour. We want to see the Scottish Government backing this up by setting out clear career pathways for carers, ending the undervaluing of skills in the sector.

Giving social care the attention it deserves requires a lot more than half-baked pieces of legislation that threaten to make the situation worse. Liberal Democrats have a blueprint for how to get it right, and the government would be wise to listen.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is Scottish Liberal Democrat leader and MSP for Edinburgh Western