It has become clear that small, independent countries largely outperform the UK and offer greater security to their citizens. This includes pensions, income distribution and public social spending.
It has become clear that small, independent countries largely outperform the UK and offer greater security to their citizens.
― There is a well-understood set of criteria which are viewed as being key to the health, safety and welfare of care workers.
― During the Covid crisis there is well-documented evidence of how poorly these criteria were properly ensured for care staff in Scotland.
― There is an internationally defined and accepted hierarchy of actions to ensuring that staff health, safety and welfare is properly protected and this must underpin our approaches in future.
The Scottish government fuses nationalism with social wage and social investment concepts. It conjures up images of a prosperous, community led, egalitarian welfare state as a future reality. It recuperates “welfare” as a collective endeavour. It describes austerity as a poor distribution of resources between groups and within the UK as the “problem”.
Have a read and ask yourself: wouldn’t you like to live in a country with a social/economic/environmental policy framework based on this set of values? Wouldn’t you like to be able to vote to create such a nation?
his week, Craig is joined by Marion Macleod – an expert in social care and education for children and author of Common Weal’s latest policy paper on a strategic plan for childcare. They discuss the current patchwork state of child and early years care in Scotland, how the latest Programme for Government perpetuates that even if the policies themselves may be valuable and how things could be greatly improved by a strategic and holistic plan for care sitting within a National Care Service.
An analsys of the d devolution of social security powers to the Scottish Parliament in the Scotland Bill. Whilst the reforms have been represented as giving Scotland “one of the most powerful devolved parliaments in the world.” it is debatable that this is the case. In any federal system, powers lie by default with the states, not with central government. It is open to the states (and sometimes to local governments) to experiment and to innovate. Scotland will not be able to do this.
The Promise is the key driver of the Scottish Government’s policy in relation to family support and out-of-home care for children. It is largely based on information drawn from the views and opinions of people who have experience of care – but research data and other empirical evidence has being given lesser prominence in creating policies.
This has led to an emphasis on responding to whichever issues arise from those expressing views rather than developing strategies based on the overall political, economic and social context in which problems arise.
Few in politics and in government now dispute the central importance of getting support for children in their early years right if we want to create a wellbeing economy with healthy and productive citizens in the future. But, in reality, Scotland has a system of support for children in their early years which is a patchwork of initiatives, fixes, legacy services and omissions. What we do not have is a single, well thought- through integrated service. This is what Scotland’s children need.
Nick Kempe investigates the Care Inspectorate’s attempts to assess the ongoing response in Scottish care homes to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Whilst some care homes have improved, Kempe raises serious concerns about the quality of data being gathered and the “slow and seemingly random way” in which care homes are being reassessed. He raises particular concern that five months on from the onset of the pandemic in Scotland, staff in care homes are still not being properly trained in infection control.