Ticking time-bombs!

Ticking time-bombs at the heart of Scotland’s social care system!

Increasingly, the people best-placed to monitor social care delivery and provision in Scotland find themselves stonewalled when they reach out to their local authority or to Scotland’s social care regulator, the Care Inspectorate, when things go wrong for them or for a family member or friend.

From their experiences, it is clear that scrutiny of the operations, performance and risks of Scotland’s 32 local authorities and the country’s Care Inspectorate is so lax that public sector staff working in social care in Scotland are, in effect, taken on trust while chief executives look the other way.

This is reminiscent of the light-touch regulation that sections of the British banking industry once enjoyed but which set the scene for high-profile scandals and blow-ups, like that of Barings in 1995, and led to the current ever-evolving system of financial regulation and risk management designed to align the incentives of retail banks, financials services firms and their customers.

BetterCareScotland exposes the unfortunate consequences for people experiencing poor social care outcomes in Scotland on the very day that the UK Parliament’s cross-party Joint Committee on Human Rights acknowledges the pain and suffering that public institutions and state employees can knowingly inflict on people at their time of greatest need.

Against this backdrop, people in Scotland are routinely silenced, blamed, even threatened by high-handed and judgemental local authority and Care Inspectorate staff when they reach out, their concerns deflected and covered-up. For, Scotland’s local authorities and its Care Inspectorate have brought the country’s social care system to its knees, a fact that the heads of these bodies take care to conceal.

The lived-experiences of BetterCareScotland’s subscribers reveal grotesque abuses of position by local authority social care bosses and chief executives and a supposedly-independent Care Inspectorate lacking in conviction and seemingly unaware that it has a role in exercising oversight of social care delivery by Scotland’s local authorities. It is clear that Scotland’s Care Inspectorate and some of the country’s local authorities should have been placed in special measures years ago.

From 2028/29, if Scotland’s dysfunctional social care system is replaced by a fully-operational National Care Service, local authorities will no longer have responsibility for the delivery of social care. But 2028/29 cannot come soon enough. With ticking time-bombs at the heart of the country’s social care system, four years is a long time for things to go badly wrong!

By analysing data from our subscribers’ lived experiences of social care delivery, provision, and regulation – whether as a service user or a family member or friend, a carer, a former or in-post social worker, or a Care Inspectorate staffer, none off whom dare blow the whistle for fear of the consequences – BetterCareScotland identifies risks to which people in desperate need of care in Scotland are exposed but which become apparent to them and their family members and friends only when it is too late.

Our data show that, when things do go wrong, local authority and Care Inspectorate staff are incentivised to go to great lengths to keep people at an informational disadvantage when transparency should be expected. And to deny people a remedy, even when the only remedy sought is the assurance that no-one else will be abused as they were. It is hard to imagine a social care system further removed from the Nordic model to which Scotland aspires.

The experience of our contributors is that no form of retaliation seems out of bounds to local authority staff when people reach out after things go wrong. In the words of Tom, a BetterCareScotland subscriber, “You will be deflected, denigrated, discredited, ridiculed, blamed, even threatened by the chief executive’s staff – and that’s just before lunch!” But, such remarkable stoicism conceals the dreadful impacts on the mental health of people finding themselves at the mercy of uncaring local authority and Care Inspectorate staff.

In a series of ‘ticking time-bomb’ blogs, BetterCareScotland will reveal the grotesque nature of the risks to which people at their time of greatest need are knowingly exposed by local authority and Care Inspectorate staff in Scotland who, despite their duty of care, are found to act in their own self-interest at the direction of senior co-workers, management teams, department heads and, ultimately, unaccountable chief executives. And of governance gaps and leadership issues which enable vested interests and perverse incentive structures to be hard-wired into Scotland’s social care system for the convenience of public sector staff.

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Love and Peace!