Scottish Care Calls for Transparency, Sustainability and Fairness in Social Care Funding

Scottish Care today confirmed that it has written to all care home members seeking permission to obtain formal legal advice regarding the processes and implications of any potential withdrawal from the National Care Home Contract (NCHC). This step follows years of increasingly challenging negotiations and deep and unresolved concerns about the Cost of Care Model used to determine annual fee rates.

We have been clear with our members and partners: this is not a decision to leave the NCHC, nor is it a commitment to any specific course of action. It is a necessary, prudent and transparent step to ensure that our sector fully understands its legal position in a landscape of growing financial instability.

Our correspondence to members reflects the seriousness of the moment. Offers made in recent negotiations fall far short of what is needed to maintain safe, rights‑based and sustainable care for older people across Scotland. Providers are facing unprecedented pressures: rising workforce costs, escalating operational expenditure, and the increasing fragility of local commissioning arrangements.

Last week’s Accounts Commission report, highlighting the acute financial strain across local authorities, further reinforces the scale of the challenge. At the same time, COSLA’s call for an additional £750 million simply to stabilise local services demonstrates the depth of the crisis and the impossibility of continuing to deliver complex, skilled social care within a funding system that is no longer fit for purpose.

Scottish Care believes that the people who live in care homes, their families, and the workforce who support them deserve honesty and urgency from all partners. The current settlement model is failing to reflect the real cost of delivering high‑quality, person‑led care. Without decisive national intervention, there is a real risk of further provider withdrawals, service reductions, and diminished choice for older citizens.

Our request to members is therefore part of a responsible and proportionate process. It aims to ensure that Scottish Care, on behalf of the largest group of independent sector providers in the country, is able to explore every available option to protect the sustainability of vital care services.

We remain committed to constructive partnership working with COSLA, the Scottish Government and all system leaders. But collaboration must be matched by realism. Scotland cannot continue to rely on a social care sector that is expected to absorb risk without adequate resource, flexibility, or respect for the professional care workforce.

Scottish Care will inform members of the outcome of the vote and any subsequent legal advice as soon as this is available. In the meantime, we reiterate our call for urgent, fair and evidence‑based action to secure the future of social care in Scotland.

-ENDS-

Last Updated on 2nd March 2026 by Shanice