An excoriating report from Audit Scotland finds that plans to improve the country’s care system have been slow to come together and have not been planned properly.
Audit Scotland, the public body responsible for the performance of Scotland’s public sector, has said that plans to improve Scotland’s care system have been slow to come together after not enough early delivery planning by the Scottish government and COSLA, the national association of Scottish councils.
The damning report examines The Promise, a decade-long national commitment which was made in 2020 to improve the lives of people in care. Five years on, there is still confusion about what different bodies should be doing to deliver the changes needed, the report says.
“Public bodies remain committed to improving Scotland’s care system and the lives of people who go through it. But initial planning about how The Promise would be delivered didn’t provide a strong platform for success,” said auditor general Stephen Boyle.
No accountability
Scottish government funding for The Promise has increased, but is difficult to quantify and track. The report says that the Scottish Government introduced a £500 million Whole-Family Wellbeing fund in 2022 to help deliver The Promise. It is unclear, however, how the £500 million figure was arrived at, and anyway only £148 million has been allocated.
Plans to date have lacked detail and direction for individual sectors. New structures set up by the Scottish government to help deliver The Promise have lacked clarity about their roles and responsibilities. And Scottish government efforts to streamline The Promise’s governance arrangements have been insufficient.
This has contributed to slow progress and made collective accountability challenging, it says.
From the outset, there was no assessment of what resources and skills were needed to deliver The Promise by 2030, or how success would be defined or measured. A framework to measure progress was agreed in December last year, but further work remains.
The report also said that the Scottish government is working on national data, which is not currently good enough to assess if services are improving the lives of people in care.
In response to the report, COSLA said that it would “fully consider the recommendations” alongside its partners.
