New Scottish Care Evidence Highlights the Reality Facing Social Care in Scotland
Scottish Care will submit new evidence tomorrow (Wednesday 9 September 2026) to the Scottish Parliament’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, setting out the significant challenges facing social care across Scotland and calling for reform to be matched by investment, capacity and long-term sustainability.
The paper, Social Care in Scotland: The Reality Behind the Reform Debate, outlines six interconnected challenges currently affecting the sector:
- Increasing difficulty accessing care and support.
- Growing complexity of care needs.
- Ongoing workforce shortages.
- Mounting financial pressures on providers.
- Financial challenges within Health and Social Care Partnerships.
- The risk that reform will fail unless accompanied by investment and capacity-building measures.
Drawing on evidence gathered from providers across Scotland, the submission highlights concerns around delayed access to care, increasing complexity of need, workforce pressures and the growing challenge of financial sustainability.
The paper argues that while there is broad agreement on the outcomes Scotland wants to achieve, including greater prevention, improved wellbeing and reduced pressure on hospitals, these ambitions can only be realised if social care has the workforce, funding and infrastructure required to deliver them.
Scottish Care’s submission sets out a series of recommendations for Government, Parliament and public bodies, including a transparent true-cost-of-care framework, a fully funded workforce strategy, improved involvement of independent sector providers in decision-making and stronger accountability for delivery of reform.
At the heart of the submission is a clear message: the challenge facing Scotland is not whether social care should be reformed, but whether the country is prepared to invest in and sustain the social care capacity needed to make that reform a reality.
