Social care review demand

Dumfries and Galloway Council will call on the Scottish Government to urgently review social care legislation to prevent the risk of vulnerable people being exploited. At last week’s full council meeting, the Dumfries and Galloway Labour Group secured a council commitment to request that Holyrood ministers re-evaluate The Social Care (Self Directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013, recognising “the alarming gaps in measuring, monitoring and reviewing service provision”. Labour councillors underlined how these gaps could lead to the exploitation of a vulnerable group of people with additional needs, who choose to utilise self-directed support funding to pay directly for support from others. A motion on the issue was tabled by Lochar Councillor Linda Dorward, who insisted that the Scottish Government should swiftly review how the provision of services in ‘The Act’ is monitored at a local government level and overseen at national level. Councillor Dorward, above, said: “There is no requirement for services paid for via self-directed support to be registered and no requirement to vet or monitor them. “This, if taken to its ultimate conclusion, could leave some individuals, often without the ability to object to service delivery, being potentially open to exploitation and a degree of entrapment regarding their ability to move on to employ an alternative service or to more positive destinations such as paid employment”. Councillors unanimously backed Labour’s proposal, committing the SNP-led administration to write to the Scottish Government to request a review of the Act that includes: mandatory provision of monitoring for personal assistants and service providers paid for via self directed support by local authorities, and mandatory provision of state oversight/regulation of service provision and personal assistants paid for via self-directed support via local authorities as per the Care Inspectorate model. After the meeting, the Labour Group issued the following statement: “We will always support the right of individuals to choose their own care but also want to ensure the rights of all individuals are protected and that the risk of exploitation is negated.”