[Robin McAlpine Blog] Fix your care service? What a brass neck.

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Fix your care service? What a brass neck.

As the world feels like it is increasingly wobbling on the brink of utter catastrophe (please Joe Biden, tell us more about your ceasefire…) it is perhaps odd that one of the things that has riled me most today is the Scottish Government. But it has, and I’m feeling something not completely unlike fury.

You see, Neil Gray says that we all need to get round his table and bang our own heads together to save his dreadful National Care Service policy. It’s hard to express how insulting, condescending and plain surreal this statement is. Because that’s what we’ve been doing for a hear and a half now and the Scottish Government has treated us all with outright contempt.

I will only do a very quick summary of events here because it is beyond farcical for Neil Gray to say these words. The moment when almost every stakeholder told him that it was the Scottish Government that needed to get itself round the table and listen was the moment when the Scottish Government should have been listening.

Almost all the key stakeholders pulled out of the process of creating the National Care Service because it had zero support and Common Weal was among many of the key players in this who demanded a pause to try and turn the legislation into, well… something not dreadful would have been a start.

That was in March last year. In fact just go and get a grip on the timeline which you can flip through here. Because what happened after that pause has utterly enraged almost everyone involved with it – it’s just that they can’t all say it out loud.

I won’t go into all that either because Nick Kempe of the Common Weal Care Reform Group has documented this in detail throughout the process (this article explains why the Neil Gray line is so insulting). What happened was this; the Scottish Government invented a process with so many moving parts (many, many dozens of them) that met and met and met and…

...resulted in precisely the same legislation that we’d all objected to a year and a half ago. Every promise they made has been a lie, at every single stage. They promised to revise the legislation then said they wouldn’t. Then they promised to create extensive amendments to the legislation and they didn’t. Then they promised to share those amendments but they didn’t and said they wouldn’t at any stage until it was vote time.

So what we have is a piece of legislation knocked up for the now notoriously policy-clueless Nicola Sturgeon after a half-arsed ‘review’ by an expert whose brief seemed to be ‘do as little as possible to let me launch this’ which was then ‘worked up’ by consultants via many hundreds of thousands of pounds of contracts, including over £600,000 given to KPMG even though the Scottish Government’s own officials warned it that KPMG was ‘thoroughly dishonest’.

(I put ‘worked up’ in quote marks there because I know what the consultants ‘worked up’ and you’ll be shocked when you find out what that was but would it surprise you to discover that we’re currently in a never-ending process of appealing the fact that they’ve redacted the bollocks out of it?)

Having given everyone the bureaucratic version of a years’ worth of fuck-yous, you want a favour now?

The proposals were never at any point fit for purpose. The Scottish Government has been told this by every local authority in Scotland (these are the bodies that mainly organise care), by most of the representative bodies of the social work profession (social workers are to care what GPs are to the NHS), almost every other stakeholder including representatives of informal carers, and every single trade union with members working in the care sector.

It was told this a year and a half ago and so has been detaining everyone for that length of time in never-ending meetings and the outcome of it all is basically exactly the same as it was before this whole farce began.

As always, public agencies and bodies which represent professionals need to be discreet in public. In fact this is one of the biggest problems with public policy in Scotland – all the experts seem to be put in a position where they can’t say what they actually think because of threats to their funding and access to decision-makers.

But I’ve seen all the private emails (Common Weal is represented on the main stakeholder group) and everyone else is as furious as I am. It’s not like the Scottish Government didn’t know this – hell’s teeth, if you’re a regular reader you know this because I’ve been telling you for months this was all going to collapse again.

The Scottish Government has been told this over and over again and it has put two fingers up to us all and said (in the toughest voice it could force out of its little mouth) ‘what are you going to do about it then, eh?’.

This, Neil Gray. This is what we’re going to do about it. This is what everyone was always going to do. You waved around your proposals and your consultants and your gibberish speech and your officials made clear we’d get what they give us and no more. You made clear how little you value all the input made over that time.

So everyone is walking away – and now you’re all teary-eyed and ‘sorry guys, can’t we just be friends?’. Having given everyone the bureaucratic version of a years’ worth of fuck-yous, you want a favour now? You want us to rescue your Bill? Like we offered to do last year? What credibility do you think you have?

If I’m being charitable I’d suggest that the politicians are being conned over what this legislation is really about

Scotland is now a race to see who can be most incompetent and unpopular fastest – John Swinney and the Scottish Government or Keir Starmer and the UK Government. The former had a substantial lead going into the first corner but then Starmer came hounding up the outside in £30k of suits and £3k of specs.

But every time he threatens to overtake them, the Scottish Government puts on a little spurt of incompetence and the race stays neck and neck. And we’ve got another 18 months of this before this god-awful race reaches its next checkpoint.

I get people asking me a lot how the Scottish Government can be so bad. This is why. It pursues vanity projects it hasn’t thought through (Sturgeon made this up during Covid partly because a national care service was the talk of the steamie and partly to distract from having sent Covid-positive patients into care homes). It gives the contract to design public service to a ‘thoroughly dishonest’ consultancy.

It is told the results aren’t fit for purpose. Everyone walks out so they are forced into a pause. They then spend a year ignoring everything everyone who forced the pause on them told them, only to return with the same legislation. So everyone walks out again. And they’re… surprised.

Meanwhile I warned people close to the SNP leadership that this was all going to happen months ago. I begged them to get the Scottish Government to backtrack and prevent this inevitable outcome. They got to Swinney, who said ‘we have no option, we need to clear old people out of hospital beds’ (or words to that effect).

Except this legislation has absolutely nothing to do with ‘clearing’ old people out of hospital beds, a desperately narrow mindset which is exactly what led to the Covid-positive-old-people-to-care-homes scandal which is why Scotland probably has the highest care homes Covid deaths in Europe.

This Bill is about centralisation and privatisation. It originally proposed to take a system designed by care professionals and administered in the public realm by the public sector and transfer that into a private commissioning model centrally controlled by the Scottish Government – i.e. what KPMG’s clients would like.

If I’m being charitable I’d suggest that the politicians are being conned over what this legislation is really about. It is quite embarrassing if they really have been conned, and yet that is still better than if they’re doing all this intentionally. Because that would make them Liz Truss.

So it’s all falling apart before their eyes which are now welling up with tears as they wonder why all the horrible people are ruining their lovely Care Service. It is disgraceful that Neil Gray had the audacity to claim that the responsibility lies on us to get together with them to fix their crap legislation given that we did that a year and a half ago and were treated with contempt.

Mark my words; if the Scottish Government keeps going like this it is going to get worse and worse. They’re clearly out their league and they’re clearly being given the runaround by their own civil servants. This is all frankly embarrassing – and yet somehow not quite as embarrassing as publicly asking us to dig them out their own hole.

Source: Fix your care service? What a brass neck.