CCPS gave evidence on Public Services Reform (Scotland) Bill
Posted on Friday 11 September 2009
CCPS attended two Committees at the Scottish Government in September to give Stage 1 evidence on the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Bill – the Education and Lifelong Learning Committee and the Health and Sport Committee. This call for evidence is based on the forthcoming changes to both the Care Commission and the Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA), which are both to be dissolved and replaced in 2011 by a new scrutiny body for care, the Social Care and Social Work Improvement Agency (SCSWIS). The new SCSWIS body will assume the functions of its predecessor agencies as well as taking on a range of responsibilities in relation to children’s services and child protection that currently reside within HMIE. The provisions for this shake-up in the regulation of care are contained within the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Bill, published in May this year.
CCPS submitted written evidence, which focuses on the potential of the new body to take a ‘whole systems’ approach to scrutiny of the care system, including for example the ability to make any necessary connections between the quality of a service, the quality of the commissioning process related to that service, and the quality of the contract under which that service operates; and to address shortcomings in any part of that process. In that respect, CCPS highlights the anomaly in the Bill that SCSWIS will have robust enforcement powers in relation to care services, but none in relation to the commissioning function of local authorities; and that SCSWIS will be able to deal with complaints about services, but not about any other aspect of an individual’s dealing with the care system, for example an assessment of need. CCPS proposed that the ‘duty to co-operate’ placed by the Bill on scrutiny bodies in the interests of reducing the burden of regulation should be extended to local authorities, as a number of their monitoring procedures duplicate Care Commission activity. CCPS further suggested that the establishment of the new body represents an ideal opportunity to scrap the current system of registration fees payable by service providers in favour of a centrally-funded body.
For more information about the evidence given at these two committees, you can access the following links to the Official Report on the Scottish Parliament website for both the Education and Lifelong Learning Committee - attended by CCPS Director, Annie Gunner Logan - and the Health and Sport Committee attended by CCPS Convenor, Nigel Henderson.
For more information about the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Bill and related issues, you can access the Regulation of Care Hot Topic page on this website.