Budget ‘does not respond to the scale of jeopardy in social care’    

Responding to today’s Scottish Budget statement, CCPS’s CEO Rachel Cackett said: 

“Social care needed a real boost in today’s budget and spending review. Whilst we welcome some positive decisions around child poverty, sadly social care as a whole hardly warranted a mention in the Chamber. There is little in the accompanying documents to give shape to the major changes we – and the people of Scotland – need to see.  

While today’s budget acknowledges the need for an uplift for care staff, it continues to set their baseline pay to the Real Living Wage and no more. This is a figure we have long stated is wholly inappropriate for our highly skilled, regulated workforce and is deeply unfair when compared to higher pay settlements for staff doing equivalent work in the public sector. This decision won’t address the recruitment and retention crisis we have long told the Scottish Government is negatively impacting on services for people across Scotland. 

We also note that the Cabinet Secretary focused on adult social care pay, not mentioning uplifts for staff supporting children and young people. We seek urgent clarification on this. 

What’s more, there remains absolutely no acknowledgement of the soaring on-costs faced by not-for-profit social care employers, including from eNICs changes – costs which will increase further as salaries are increased. We continue to see no relief offered in this budget. This will further destabilise a sector which this government knows is incredibly fragile. 

The budget also leaves us with questions – and perhaps these could provide some hope. There appears to be a commitment to ‘improve wider terms and conditions for workers’, but we do not yet know what this will look like in practice. And the Cabinet Secretary mentioned further investment in delayed discharge support in social care after last week’s Audit Scotland report, but it seems both the amount and the purpose of this is not yet agreed with CoSLA. We trust that CCPS will be directly involved in shaping these developments as full system partners. 

Finally, we asked for a medium-term plan in the spending review to ensure Scotland has a sustainable social care sector which can play its part supporting people, families and communities to flourish. Here, we have seen no specific commitments at all. 

There is nothing in the budget or spending review today that seems to fully acknowledge the scale of jeopardy Scotland’s social care system currently faces. There was little cross-party focus on changing this.   

In the coming days we will further analyse the documents published, and talk to our members and partners about the impact of these investment plans – but we still hope there is space to make some different choices before the Budget Bill is passed.”