Caring For All

The Scottish Government is currently developing proposals for a National Care Service. These are based around a premise that care is a commodity that can be claimed as a right and that it exists as a series of instrumental tasks to be undertaken by paid carers. Common Weal has developed an alternative set of proposals based on care being integral to human existence and that care needs are bound up with and met through relationships.
Our argument is that care matters as much as health and, because of that, needs its own parallel service, from the cradle to the grave (or ‘from the womb to the tomb’). After the horrors of the pandemic, we believe Scotland should be creating a National Care Service (NCS) worthy of the name, not re-packaging the current failed system. This means creating an NCS for all, one from which anyone and everyone would have a right to help. Caring For All describes the why and how of the way we think such a service should work and the reforms needed to achieve this.
These proposals have been developed by Common Weal’s Care Reform Group whose members have been thinking, talking and writing about care since the Covid-19 pandemic revealed the depth of the crisis in our care system last year. This paper is the product of more than 18 months of work – all voluntary – written in a way that we hope anyone can understand.
Caring For All is supported by a number of other papers which set out in more detail the justifications for what we say here and which are designed to give politicians, policy-makers, managers, trade unions, the organisations representing service users and carers and all the other stakeholders in the care system the sort of information they need to turn these proposals into reality. This means consideration of what care in all its complexities should be about; our thoughts about what is wrong with current policy; detailed analyses of how parts of the current system operate and what needs to change – and more. Some of these papers have been published and others will be published in due course. We are still working on some of the detail on the internal workings of the new service, but this report is about how a real National Care Service should look and feel and work with people.
Our hope is our proposals will inspire people across Scotland to start talking publicly about care – about needs, hopes and aspirations – and that they come to realise that, if we have the political will, we could make the NCS one of the pillars of a new welfare state, to sit alongside and complement the NHS.