Fromer health minister feels anger and is dispirited over loss of support

The minister who first backed Scotland’s proposed National Care Service has lunged at the SNP leadership for wrecking her vision.

Jeane Freeman, who was made health minister during Nicola Sturgeon’s reign, commissioned the Feeley Review, which recommended a National Care Service in February 2021.

As reported in TFN, the project was all but dissolved last week as current health minister Maree Todd admitted soaring costs and a failure to define what the National Care Service would actually do led to it being unfeasible in its present guise.

Third sector groups have rounded on the government for wasting cash and dragging its heels over the project while no real progress was ever made.

While a National Care Service Bill will still go ahead it won’t include plans for a National Care Service as it stands.

Todd has yet to set out how the bill will look after scaling it back.

Now working as a public health ambassador at the University of Glasgow, Freeman condemned the Scottish Government’s failure in overseeing the project’s success.

She urged ministers to stop “trying to convince us that there is still a National Care Service when self-evidently nobody is convinced of that”.

She added: “I feel angry, I feel dispirited, because it is beyond my understanding how all of that support has been lost.”

Freeman is supporting the Coalition of Care and Support Providers' call to invest more money into frontline care rather than structural reform.

While social care wages will rise from £12 per hour to £12.60 this April, NHS staff doing the same job get on average 15% more, which in part explains why organisations have problems recruiting social care staff.

Rachel Cackett, the coalition’s chief executive, said their idea of the care service was very different from the one now being put forward by Todd, and that while more investment in social care was being made, this wasn’t having an affect on recruiting employees and frontline staff when wages still remained too low.

She said: “The government sets the wage rate for social care staff in sectors like not-for-profit providers. When contracts are set out to deliver public services those wage rates are largely set by the Scottish government and they are far too low.”

Cackett added: “Social care has always been the Cinderella service. It’s never had enough money so increasing from not much isn’t enough.

“The increase takes no account of the situation we are in at the moment with an ageing population and increasing frailty. There is nothing like enough money going in to meet need.”

Margaret Curran - now Baroness Curran of Townhead - communities minister in Jack McConnell’s Labour Scottish Executive, said: “We have really wasted so much time and money on this while kidding ourselves on that we are making progress. Let’s be honest and get a grip on this.”