CRITICISING the Scottish government’s national care service Bill is easy. Everyone does it. Including these days even the Scottish government, which has announced that it is abandoning key principles of its own legislation. The real challenge is in outlining an alternative. This is what Unison Scotland has done in commissioning our new report Towards A Real National Care Service. 

We’ve called the report A Real National Care Service to make a clear distinction from the Scottish government’s plans, which more resemble — as one delegate to STUC Congress put it — “ a press release that’s grown out of control.”  

The Scottish government intended removing all of social work and social care and an unspecified set of health services from local government and the NHS, to be given to ministerially appointed quangos. These wouldn’t deliver services but instead commission and procure services in a market.