Burnham’s National Care Service plans are a warning to the Scottish Government
The Scottish Government should adopt Andy Burnham’s approach to policy-making: to build up the detail of a proposal for change before setting the timeline to launching it.
In one of our Daily Briefings this week we asserted that Andy Burnham’s plans for a UK National Care Service must learn lessons from Scotland, outlining areas where Scotland had pushed good ideas about the future of care but also where and how the Government’s approach to making major legislation was so flawed that the collapse of the Bill became inevitable.
The Scottish Government should learn from these lessons too, not just because they apply to broader legislation for major change – such as the now proposed Local Government reform – but also because Scotland should not be content with merely hoping that Burnham gets it right on care where the Scottish Government got it wrong, so that the UK-wide plan can simply be imposed upon Scotland.
The Scottish Government still has time to bring a National Care Service back to the table and to do it right but to do so will require them to learn lessons from Burnham’s approach just as he must learn lessons from up here.
The most fundamental lesson is that the Scottish Government made a grave error in legislating for a National Care Service without having any idea what it would look like. Worse, they gave themselves a self-imposed deadline to launch the NCS before the end of what is now the last Parliament.
This meant that the entire service had to be designed, tested and then built from scratch within just a few years and starting from a position of not even having a clear answer to questions like “What is care?” or “What should happen to the private sector?”.
The result was a “Framework Bill” that legislated for the creation of an empty box called a National Care Service. The responsibility for filling the box wouldn’t be Local Authorities (who already controlled their own care systems) but would be Ministers. Ministers would decide how the box would be filled, but would work out how to fill it only after the Service was launched. Behind the scenes (where Common Weal was very much involved for several years), care groups and organisations were formed into an Expert Legislative Advisory Group that consisted of frantically trying to tell the Government what should go in the box and who should control it then being told that our job was to approve Government plans that would be forthcoming at some point in the future.
You can see why this would never have worked.
“Burnham’s Leader’s Speech at the Labour Conference this week was a genuine moment of ambition. It may well lead to exciting outcomes brought about after careful planning and strategic forethought.”
Burnham is playing a much smarter strategy here. He isn’t yet legislating for a National Care Service but has instead set up the process to design it. The Casey Commission is currently considering evidence (Common Weal has contributed to this) and then the UK Government will come up with a design based on the Commission’s recommendations. Once they’ve done that, they are going to seek a mandate at the next UK election to legislate for that design and only then will the Service be created and launched. It’s going to take time, but this is better than the time wasted in Scotland that did not result in a care service.
With care being devolved, the Scottish Government can and should come back to the table with carers, care experts and the cared for to design the National Care Service that Scotland deserves, and then seek a mandate to create it after the 2031 Scottish election. We can already say with near certainty that Scottish Labour’s manifesto then will be to adopt Burnham’s plan and unless the SNP come up with a better idea, it’ll be difficult to argue against it and indefensible to go into that election without a care service plan at all.
The same goes for other big legislative changes coming. Burnham clearly wants to roll out regional mayors across the UK and it’s just as clear that John Swinney’s latest announcement on local government reform – while positive in its own right – has a significant element to it about trying to head off the imposition of Scottish Regional Provosts who hold sole executive power (I maintain that this would be a deeply undemocratic centralisation of Local Authority powers). I agree, but this cannot come about by imposing a different kind of centralisation at massive expense and with poorly thought out strategy and outcomes.
Burnham’s Leader’s Speech at the Labour Conference this week was a genuine moment of ambition. It may well lead to exciting outcomes brought about after careful planning and strategic forethought. In this, the Scottish Government risks being outflanked not only in the policies that come from Westminster but in the way that policies are made in Westminster. It’s not too late to step up the game here too. Doing so will take some courage and aspiration as well as patience and a willingness to listen to ideas from outwith their own bubble.
