Care In Your Community
Policy Paper
Credits — Colin Turbett
Overview
Putting Community Hubs at the heart of a National Care Service.
The creation of a “National Care Service” is designed to make it seem as if something lasting and good, like the NHS in 1948, might emerge from the chaos of Covid-19. As Common Weal has argued elsewhere, at present this is in name only. This paper is a contribution to what a real National Care Service might look like.
The cover illustration for this paper is reproduced from the Army Bureau of Current Affairs paper Community Centres from 1945.
Key Points
The notion of resilient communities coping with the pandemic has revived the notion of community hubs as significant centres for public service delivery and voluntary activity.
Community development as a component of the shaping and delivery of services has a long history, but suffered through the years of politically-contrived public expenditure cuts and austerity.
Notions of community empowerment already enshrined in law ought to be compatible with the decentralisation of public services and bottom-up community partnership and control.
Community hubs could offer a physical base for a model of public service based on relationships at local level, local networks and partnerships, and local democracy.
The National Care Service that Scotland needs could be managed and delivered at local level through community hubs.
Just as the 1939-1945 World War crisis led to visions of a different kind of world in the peace to follow, so should we be similarly ambitious in our vision of our country post-pandemic.
