Including services such as adult social care and community justice in the proposed new National Care Service would be a “grave error”, ministers have been warned.
Solace, which represents local authority chief executives and other senior officials, said that such a move is “potentially a harmful course of action”.
Local authorities should keep statutory responsibility for adult social work and social care services, children and family social work and social care services, mental health services, community justice service, housing and homelessness services and alcohol and drug partnership, Solace argued in its response to a government consultation.
Shifting the responsibility to the National Care Service would “add complexity rather than bring transparency and simplification”, Solace stated.
It added that “removing the statutory responsibility from local control, closest to the people who need it, and placing it into central national control, would be a grave error”.
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Solace added that there were “a number of areas of key risks, in particular in vital areas of adult, child and other public protection where an array of multi-disciplinary work is currently undertaken at a local level”. The Scottish government has set out proposals which could see traditional care services come under the remit of the National Care Service.
But the consultation document also said there was a need to “consider the merits of extending the scope of a National Care Service to oversee all age groups and a wider range of needs”, by taking in services for children and young people, social work, community justice, and alcohol and drug services.
Council leaders in Cosla have already voiced “real concerns” about this change. Now Solace has warned that there are “areas in which attempting to replace locally delivered services with a central, nationally delivered service, whilst laudable in its aim, could have very significant and negative unintended consequences for service users”.
It said that the care sector had been “chronically underfunded for decades”, adding that this had been “particularly acute” since 2008.
Solace complained that local government had not been involved in developing the proposals and the consultation had taken place at a time when care services were facing “unprecedented pressure” because of coronavirus.
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Solace insisted: “Creating a National Care Service is perhaps the biggest policy implementation this, or any, Scottish government has ever undertaken. It is worth taking the time to get it right — together.”
Separately, a charity is calling for an urgent “right to respite” for people living with long-term neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease or Parkinson’s, and those who care for them.
Leuchie House, the national respite centre based in North Berwick, believes a National Care Service needs to tackle the limits to respite options available to unpaid carers, and to make a short break from care a priority, with provision currently “a genuine lottery”.
