Chamber and committees

I will come back to the minister’s point, but he has some gall to stand there when he has presided over a postcode lottery for 15 years.

The message is clear—pause the bill now and get back round the table. Our social care sector needs Government action to deal with the immediate problems. Care workers cannot wait another three or four years on the promise of a national care service that is not worth the paper that it is written on.

That is why Scottish Labour has called for an immediate uplift in the wage of social care workers to £12 per hour, rising to £15 per hour, and for the Government to deliver on the recommendations of the independent review into adult social care by scrapping non-residential care charges for those who are supported to live in their own home by social care workers. That was a manifesto pledge of this Government that it does not seem too keen on fulfilling any time soon.

It is time that the minister and the cabinet secretary removed their heads from the sand and addressed the significant and growing concerns of front-line workers, trade unions, professional bodies, local government, their own back benchers and—before the minister gets to his feet to intervene again—people with lived experience, who are speaking to me and sharing their concerns about this shambles of a bill.

The Government needs to get serious about addressing the crisis in social care, and it has to act now to give social care workers a meaningful pay rise and scrap those non-residential care charges. Addressing that crisis in social care will have a huge impact on the problems in our national health service, because it is clear that having meaningful and real action on dealing with delayed discharge can change the game in relation to what is happening in our NHS. This Government needs to get serious about it.

It is clear to me that we must put people at the heart of this national care service if it is going to work at all. Social care workers do not need warm words and platitudes from this Government, or ministers who were happy to stand and clap for them during the pandemic, but a real pay rise.

I move amendment S6M-07813.1, to insert at end:

“, and further calls on the Scottish Government to immediately uplift social care pay to £12 per hour with a plan to raise it to £15 per hour and, as recommended in the Feeley Review, remove non-residential care charges.”

In my speech, I think that I have outlined the importance of the relationship with the dentist in ensuring that a person’s appointment is their gateway to the services that they require for good oral health.

“What’s needed now is real reform to a broken system. There can be no more kicking the can down the road—a sustainable model must be in place come October.”

Those are not my words; they are the words of the chair of the British Dental Association’s Scottish dental practice committee, David McColl.

As a matter of urgency, the Scottish Government must fix the systemic issues in the current funding model if it is serious about maintaining a universal NHS dentistry service across Scotland. We need to shift the debate away from the proportion of the public who are registered with a dentist and focus on who is able to access a dental appointment.

If action is not taken, we will see the end of dentistry as we know it in Scotland, with a two-tier system of care: one for the rich and one for the rest.

I thank the Liberal Democrats for bringing this debate to the chamber. I am pleased to open on behalf of the Scottish Labour Party.

The proposed national care service is one of this Government’s self-proclaimed flagship policies in this parliamentary session. It is, of course, a concept that this party first suggested more than a decade ago, but our vision was not the shambles that the Government is currently presiding over. The SNP has presented a hollowed-out, unfunded mess of a bill that is not worthy of the name “national care service”.

As each week passes, the voices raising concerns about the bill continue to multiply. The Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland has called for the bill to be paused because of the “considerable work” needed to make the legislation workable. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the umbrella body for Scotland’s councils, has called for a pause due to insufficient funding and lack of clarity around key aspects of the bill, including the viability of local authorities. Unite the Union has withdrawn from the co-design process due to its losing confidence in the Government’s approach. Unison has described the bill as “unfit for purpose” and stated that it “would be better withdrawn”.

This Parliament’s own committees—including the Finance and Public Administration Committee, the Education, Children and Young People Committee and the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee—have raised significant concerns about the scope and structure of the proposed bill. Only last week, the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee joined the chorus of voices calling for the bill to be paused.

The minister said that he will listen to Parliament. I think that his message on the national care service bill is becoming clearer by the day.

That will only exacerbate and further entrench existing health inequalities in oral health.

I am in my last minute, but I will take a very brief intervention.

Given the pressures that are faced by unpaid carers—one of the groups who have been most adversely affected by the pandemic—not least due to rising energy bills, as has been articulated in the chamber during First Minister’s question time, as well as their needs in the recovery phase, what does the Deputy First Minister intend to do to support them through the Covid recovery budget, not least in relation to testing, antivirals and personal protective equipment?

Good morning to the panel, and thank you for your important testimony this morning. I want to expand on how the patient safety commissioner might understand emerging themes and patterns and so might be able to prevent some of the issues that we have discussed. To what extent do the witnesses think that their experiences are rooted in a failure to pick up on early signals of adverse outcomes? We have heard about some of that already, so I suppose that my follow-on is: what confidence do the witnesses have that the patient safety commissioner could improve the capacity to pick up on early signs of adverse outcomes?

I wonder whether Fraser Morton or Marie Lyon wants to comment on that.

What has been said about the commissioner’s independence is helpful. I want to pick up on what Dr Lamont said.

Do you see the patient safety commissioner having a wider role in social care? Given the debates that we are having in Parliament around a national care service and the potential for the provision of care to change, do you think that the commissioner might be able to go beyond their present scope? How would we hold the commissioner and ministers accountable in that space?

The cost of living crisis is being felt most acutely by people with caring responsibilities and those who are in receipt of care.

The Scottish Government commissioned the independent review of adult social care, which included a recommendation to scrap non-residential care charges, but we know that action has not been forthcoming to deliver on that recommendation. The removal of non-residential social care charges would, overnight, improve the lives of more than 100,000 people in Scotland by relieving the financial pressure on their households. Why has the First Minister failed to listen to experts such as Derek Feeley, and to scrap non-residential care charges?

A number of respondents to the consultation on the Scottish bill felt that the patient safety commissioner should also cover social care. Indeed, social care is topical given the challenges in that sector. Also, as we have come out of Covid, there has been a renewed focus on safety in social care. Baroness Cumberlege, do you think that there is a case for including it in the patient safety commissioner’s remit?