National Care Service (Scotland) Bill (Stage 2) – Call For Views

Consultation Response

Credits — Common Weal

Overview

A Common Weal response to the Call For Views on Stage 2 of the National Care Service Bill and the Scottish Government’s proposed amendments.

The National Care Service Bill remains in a precarious state and Common Weal was extremely disappointed when we discovered that, after many months and many thousands of person.hours spent by us and by the many other stakeholders in the Scottish Care Sector to attempt to co-design the Bill and the NCS, the Bill that returned to Parliament in Stage 1 after its initial introduction was essentially unchanged. Government amendments to the Bill at Stage 2 were not as readily forthcoming as we were led to believe by Ministers and the Scottish Parliament finds itself now in the unprecedented situation of creating a round of consultations to scrutinise those amendments.

During the course of the summer of 2024, Common Weal decided instead to produce our own comprehensive set of amendments to the Bill that would, if adopted in entirety, bring the NCS into a state much closer to our vision of a publicly owned, not-for-profit, locally controlled NCS as laid our in our blueprint ‘Caring For All’. These amendments, published as a policy paper ‘Fixing the National Care Service Bill’, have been submitted as our primary response to this Call for Views and many of our answers below point directly to that paper as a more detailed answer than can be outlined in this Call.

Additionally, we have also submitted a blueprint for the creation of a National Social Work Agency that would create an organisation much more independent of Government than would be provided for by the current NCS Bill and the Government amendments and have published that paper also under the title ‘Social Care and Social Work – National Entitlement or National Control?’. We would encourage the Government and relevant committees to consider all three documents to be part of our combined submission to this consultation.