Agreement reached over employment of social workers under Scotland's National Care Service
Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 12 July, 2023
Social workers will still be employed by local authorities under plans to create a National Care Service (NCS) in Scotland.
Councils will be responsible for delivering social care services and the buildings in which social workers and social care staff work. Accountability, however, will be shared between local authorities, the Scottish Government and the NHS under new governance arrangements to ensure national consistency.
The agreement ends months of talks between the Scottish Government and local authorities over the creation of the NCS.
Councils have expressed concern about delivery and accountability being stripped from democratically elected local politicians. The Scottish Association of Social Work has also highlighted uncertainty over where social workers would work and who would employ them.
Social care minister Maree Todd said: “This partnership between the Scottish Government, local government and the NHS helps establish where responsibility for people’s care will sit under the National Care Service.
“The detail of how this will work at a local level will be developed in the coming months and we will continue to update parliament on this work, along with the results of our ongoing co-design events taking place across the country, after the summer recess.”
Cllr Paul Kelly, heath and social care spokesperson for COSLA, which represents local authorities in Scotland, said: “Combining shared national accountability with local expertise ensures the right balance of further improvement across Scotland, whilst rightly reflecting the diverse needs of local communities.
“We hope by setting out the continued role of local authorities in delivering social care and social work functions, and staff remaining employed within councils, we offer comfort and stability to the local government workforce.”
UNISON Scotland welcomed the agreement. Head of local government Johanna Baxter said: ““It is vital that social care is kept in local democratic control so that service users and families can take up problems with their local councillors and councils can champion care services for vulnerable people in their local areas.”
She stressed the NCS must ensure good working conditions for social care staff: “They need fair pay, decent working hours and proper training. And those employed by the third and private sector need collective sectoral bargaining to ensure they can keep the pressure on government and care providers to deliver this.”
Baxter added UNISON must be involved in discussions over the detail of how the new shared accountability arrangement will work.
The Scottish Association of Social Workers said the agreement reduced anxiety among social workers about their furture employer.
But national director Alison Bavidge added: "While the statement is the first step in enabling more detailed discussion around structures and governance, it does not give a clear route map for those improvements around access to support and the consistent yet tailored approaches that people in Scotland deserve from their public services.
"The profession now needs assurance that social workers will be enabled as respected, accountable and autonomous professionals who support people when they need it."
This, said Bavidge, included ensuring they have time to develop meaningful relationships with individuals, families and communities, manageable workloads, reducing bureaucracy and being able to deliver preventative and early support through community engagement. Without this the system will remain "primarily focussed on individuals and tasks rather than social wellbeing", she said.
The National Care Service (Scotland) Bill establishing the new service is currently going through the Scottish Parliament. It follows recommendations of the Independent Review of Adult Social Care chaired by Derek Feeley in 2020 that were taken forward by the Scottish Government.
The new service aims to end a “postcode lottery” of care ensuring it is “offered in the same way and at the same standard throughout Scotland”.
Under the original proposals, ‘care boards’ would be created directly accountable to ministers to deliver the service, with social care staff in councils transferred across to them.
The latest announcement, however, appears to roll back on this. Uncertainty still remains over whether children’s services and justice social work will be included within the NCS.
At the end of last year, the Scottish Government launched a review into whether children’s social services should be part of the new service. It has yet to report its findings.
Similar work is also ongoing regarding whether justice social work will be part of the NCS.