Claire Cairns welcomes a new bill to give carers the right to help from their council but argues everyone should get the same support

This week marks a key milestone for the carers movement in Scotland with the introduced of a planned new laws that focus specifically on carers.

Up to now carers have been frustrated that they have a right to a carers assessment, but no right to the services they are assessed as needing. Local authorities instead have a power to support carers, which means there are 32 different systems across Scotland and a great deal of inconsistency and inequity.

The Carers Bill intends to change this by introducing a duty in councils to support carers, where they are assessed as needing support through an Adult Carer Support Plan and where they meet eligibility criteria.

It might feels like the Carers Bill has come out of the blue but un reality the contribution carers make to health and social care provision has been increasingly recognised over the last few years. But recognition isn’t enough and we need rights. The government has recognised that supporting carers who give up their time, their energy and sometimes their health to care for a loved one is not only a moral imperative but also makes good financial sense.

While there is no statutory responsibility to support carers, the system will always lack equity and require people to fight for support

Claire Cairns

I have heard many stories of how people have struggled to get support, sometimes in the most desperate of circumstances. I particularly remember one carer who was waiting for an operation to treat a life threatening brain aneurysm, but who was struggling to get her council to arrange replacement care so that she could leave her mum to go into hospital.

That is not to say that many carers don’t get excellent support from their local authorities, or from local carer centres and other third sector organisations – fortunately they do. But while there is no statutory responsibility to support carers, the system will always lack equity and require people to fight for support.

This bill offers a tantalising promise of new rights for carers and the hope that there will be some clarity in the future about what they are entitled to, putting an end to the postcode lottery.

But will it succeed? At the moment the Scottish Government plans to base these new rights on local eligibility criteria. This puts us in danger of continuing to have 32 different systems for carers to navigate their way through without any greater clarity or consistency?

Carers argue that instead we should follow in the footsteps of England and Wales and introduce national eligibility criteria.

We are hoping to make a convincing argument to the government to amend and strengthen the bill as it makes its way through parliament, because as one carer put it: “There needs to be equality across the board – everyone assessed using the same eligibility criteria with the same entitlements to support and resources”.

Claire Cairns is network coordinator for the Coalition of Carers in Scotland