How £27 million was wasted on Scotland's National Care Service

Common Weal Care Reform GroupThis article was previously submitted to and printed in The Herald.The Scottish Government has announced that this week the incredibly unpopular National Care Service proposals it has been trying to push through for three years are all but finally dead. None of those who opposed the legislation are celebrating.This process has wasted a scandalous £27 million of public money.But almost worse is the fact that all this time and energy has been wasted on this pointless vanity project at a time when care services in Scotland are on the brink of crisis.We now face an uncertain future for care because put simply, there was no serious consideration of the real issues and what reform was needed because the politicians were instead determined to push through a managerialist centralisation of power against the will of everyone involved.We cannot become immune to this kind of failure in Scotland. There are very serious questions to be asked about whether this money has been used appropriately and in line with the public interest.Much of the spending has been wasted on what was in effect a manipulative political PR campaign to undermine opponents, to try and distract and divide them and to provide them with promise after promise which were subsequently broken.If Scotland is to have any sense of public propriety and accountability, governments cannot be allowed to behave like this. We believe there must be an independent inquiry into this entire affair.We do not have confidence in the effectiveness of slow-moving public inquiries and believe the best way for this to be done is for the Finance and Audit Committee of the Scottish Parliament to commission Audit Scotland to produce a detailed report with recommendations, reporting to the Committee.It cannot be the case that you can waste £27 million on proposal you were told from the beginning would fail, shrug and move on. There should be consequences, but just as importantly, the public needs to know what happened. Carers and those who receive care should be furious and they deserve the truth.Because what we are hearing from the Scottish Government is not truth.For the many, many of us who have expended a lot of effort trying to engage with this for three years, hearing the Scottish Government's version of what happened is like hearing something from a parallel universe. It bears no relationship whatsoever to reality.The Scottish Government claims that the National Care Service was ambitious, but it was no such thing. It was nothing more than a bureaucratic reorganisation which centralised power over commissioning care services in the hands of government ministers.There was no vision for the future of care and nothing about how care services would improve other than the belief that Scottish Government Ministers could direct care more effectively than the care professionals who actually deliver care.It says the proposal was about 'ending the postcode lottery' in care. This was never stated as the purpose of the legislation until it failed and represents a failure to understand how care works.The Government's own policy is for self-directed care and for care packages tailored to the individual. Those must be delivered locally. There is no postcode lottery because there is no one-size-fits-all care.And it claims that it is being forced to 'compromise' its plans to get support so they can pass. This is a remarkable interpretation of what happened.Virtually every single organisation involved in delivering care at more or less every level was adamantly opposed to this wrongheaded legislation from the very beginning.It was the Scottish Government's choice to force forward legislation which never stood any change of passing because it never stood any chance of getting widespread support.But instead of accepting this and working with frontline professionals to make the legislation fit for purpose the Scottish Government instead chose to spend tens of millions of pounds on what was in reality little more than an expensive and manipulative PR campaign.When the key stakeholders announced they were boycotting the legislation after it was introduced, the Scottish Government was forced to have a 'pause'. It then set up literally dozens and dozens of fragmented working groups to isolate different interests in care and prevent them from planning collectively.It then started trying to set one group against the other in the hope that if they could pit those receiving care against those delivering care, they could paint Local Authorities and care workers as the problem and claim they were standing up for those needing care against the care sector and push the legislation through.There is a deep cynicism in using people who need care or who have experienced care to undermine those who give care.It is clearly wrong for a government to do this. There is plenty to be critical about in the care delivered to vulnerable people but it has nothing to do with care-givers acting in bad faith and everything to do with the under-funded, management-directed, intensely-bureaucratic care system we have.Some estimates suggest that the professionals dealing with the most complex care cases spend a third of their time filling in paperwork and piecing together information from a largely privatised and fragmented care system rather than actually caring for people who need it.These kinds of issues were never addressed by this legislation.But despite enough working groups to sink a ship and despite every major serious concern that was raised, the legislation was pushed on virtually unchanged. They promised they would 'listen', but only after the parliament approved their legislation. They promised amendments later in the process and promised to publish them. They reneged on those promises.The relevant Parliamentary Committee eviscerated the poor quality of the financial planning in the legislation but was ignored. It asked to see the promised amendments, were told they would be provided and then later told they wouldn't.The Government then started telling people that they wouldn't actually make compromises until the legislation was passed, promising to do 'something' later through guidelines and regulations.It would be bad enough if this was just incompetence, but some of it really crossed over into dishonesty. This cannot be how we make public policy in Scotland.How could this have been done so badly? For a start, it is time to challenge consultancy culture in government. These proposals were largely produced by corporate consulting firms operating in the private sector.The Herald already reported that one contract for £545,000 was given to KMPG despite warnings from officials that KPMG had a track record of dishonesty (at that precise time Boris Johnstone was going to ban then from government contracts until they announced they would withdraw unilaterally).It took years of obstruction by the Scottish Government and an intervention from the Information Commissioner to find out what we got for our money. It is easy to see why they tried to prevent the release of this information – the total output from a half-million pound contract was eight PowerPoint slides.The civil service cannot answer for itself, which is why an independent inquiry is essential. Is this mess down to the sheer incompetence of officials or is it a result of direct Ministerial guidance – or both? 'Lessons will be learned' is not enough. There must be a promise of change.Because there is a single statistic which should stick in your mind whenever you think about this debacle. The cost of trying to push through legislation that everyone said was not fit for purpose has robbed Scotland of 330,000 weeks of care. Six thousand extra vulnerable Scots could have got the care they need this year for the price of this vanity.It is important that the Scottish Government is not allowed to rewrite history to cover up what should really be considered a national scandal.We write these words not out of anger, though we are angry. We write these words not as retribution, though there should be consequences.We write these words because we are deeply committed to the ethos of public service, the belief that policymaking must be fit for purpose, and because the political classes have let down Scotland's most vulnerable people