Volunteers Can't Guarantee Your Rights

Nick KempeWhen Shona Robison announced the budgetary winners in her speech to the Scottish Parliament on 5th December, she left out the additional £5m the Scottish Government is proposing to award to the short-breaks fund administered by the voluntary sector. Three days later the Minister for Social Care, Maree Todd, plugged the gap claiming that as a result of the £5m “we can support even more carers to look after their own health and well-being”. The news release illustrates much that is wrong the Scottish Government’s current approach to social care and serves to highlight some muddled policy thinking.The short-breaks fund is currently £8m and, according to the Scottish Government, supported “over 25,000 carers, including young carers, to take a break this year”. The £5m increase will enable “an additional 15,000 unpaid carers” to have a short break next year.To put those numbers and sums in perspective, the total represents only about 5% of the 700-800,000 carers in Scotland without whom our social care system would collapse. It is less than half the 88,615 carers who, under Scotland’s new social security system, were recorded as receiving a Carer’s Allowance Supplement Payment of £288 in April 2024. This was on top of the weekly payments given to those carers because they provided over 35 hours care a week to a person with a significant disability and had net earnings of less than £151 a week. It is still less than the 44,310 carers recorded in the Carers Census 2022-23 as having requested support from a local authority and having a statutory Carer Support plan in place.In terms of financial value, £13m shared among 40,000 carers comes to an average £325 per person prior to administrative costs. The short-breaks fund was set up to provide more flexible breaks than those traditionally provided through local authority respite care. It is administered by Shared Care Scotland who provide grants to other voluntary organisations through three different funding schemes (Better Breaks, Creative Breaks and Time To Live) to distribute the money across Scotland’s 32 local authorities.The administrative costs are significant. For example of the £3.5m allocated to the voluntary organisations administering Time To Live, £1 million was “to cover associated operational running costs”. That means that the average grant a carer received was £232, significantly less than the £288 Carers Allowance Supplement Payment (which was paid twice this year).Moreover, while originally intended to provide people with more flexible short breaks – e.g. a holiday rather than a stay in a care home – the money is now being used to pay things that things might help promote others aspect of physical or mental wellbeing, as these extracts from the Vocal Edinburgh grant application form shows: “You might want to purchase a bicycle, pair of ice skates, dart board or some fitness equipment. Or you might want to access mindfulness, Tai Chi or yoga classes. How about a spa day or a self-care gift package?” and “Would a smartphone, tablet, laptop, TV or gaming equipment help give you a break from caring?”.As we argued in Caring for All, many carers live in terrible poverty and Common Weal believes its absolutely crucial that they have sufficient income to pay for things that help alleviate the stress of caring. The way to do that, however, is to turn it into a right under Scotland’s social security system, not fund the voluntary sector to disburse charity. While the social security focus in the budget was on winter fuel payments and ending the child benefit cap, the budgetary allocation for Carers Support Payments were increased by £47m or 11% while the budget for the biennial Carers Allowance Supplement Payment increased by £6,900,000 or 13%. Although the number of carers receiving payments and the amounts involved are still way below what is needed, this is the right way for the Scottish Government to address carer poverty equitably.From a service perspective Scottish Ministers dishing out money through the voluntary sector in this way – and the short-breaks fund is not the only example – simply adds to the problems they claimed to want to address through a National Care Service.While the short-breaks fund is distributed across local authorities by a formula based on carer statistics, within local authorities who gets to know about and access these funds appears another postcode lottery. The problem has been made worse because in some local authority areas the money does not go to established carer centres but to other organisations. Thus in Edinburgh a voluntary organisation called Care for Carers helps with residential breaks, day trips and activities but VOCAL provides “wee breaks” through the Shared Care Fund. This makes our fragmented care system even worse. And since each local authority and each voluntary organisations needs to record information, all of which is done on IT systems which can’t communicate with each other so, carers face even more assessments. This was well expressed by Derek Feeley in the Independent Review of Adult Social Care when he stated that for carers, “Accessing support, whether for respite services or advice, was often described as ‘complex’, ‘time consuming’ and ‘frustrating’”.It should be no surprise that having fragmented funding streams, bureaucratic costs increase. The solution is simple, devolve the money to local authorities and let them decide how best to use and distribute it.While Scotland has far too many care “pilots”, which have never been mainstreamed, there is a case for funding innovative ways of doing things. The short breaks fund started out like that as it was clear some carers needs were not being met by traditional forms of respite. But instead of transforming the existing system and making it more flexible it has now created a parallel one.Shared Care Scotland were quoted in the Scottish Government news release as welcoming the award: “This demonstrates ongoing commitment to the right to a break and is welcome recognition of the significant impact that breaks can have on unpaid carers health and wellbeing”. Actually, it helps hide the fact that mainstream respite services provided by local authorities, many of which took a long time to re-open after Covid, have continued to reduce as a result of cuts to council budgets.Far from the fund demonstrating an “ongoing commitment to the right to a break” it undermines the very concept of that right. Meaningful rights can only derive from government not the voluntary sector. The Scottish Government’s proposed clause in the paused National Care Service Bill, titled “Right to breaks for carers” was no such thing creating new complex and convoluted eligibility criteria for carers to access a strictly limited amount of respite. It would become redundant if there was a statutory right to care for all those who needed it – as Common Weal has proposed. Such a right would mean unpaid carers could walk away from the person they were caring for any time they wished to do so for their own mental and physical well-being safe in the knowledge that the local authority would have the duty to step in.Unfortunately, a significant part of the voluntary sector in Scotland is now totally dependent on Scottish Government funding – a situation made worse by cuts to local authorities – and won’t bite the hand that feeds them and say what is really needed