by Hartwig Pautz
Argues that performance frameworks offer opportunities for a visible celebration of policy success and the identification of barriers to improvement
Care and caring is important for everyone at one or many points in their lives. It starts with the newborn and their parents and ends, for some, in care homes or with family members as unpaid carers. At each point, paid and unpaid carers require support. Parents, so that they can find the right balance between work and care; relatives, so that they can get occasional respite from their care duties, and childcare workers, so that they can cope with the stress of their workplaces. Not to forget those needing care. Support to stay in your own home even when ill or aging is needed, as are person-centred care services and family members and care workers who have the energy and the training to get it right.
A society that gets these things right, at least many of them and most of the time, is that of a country that cares. Not many countries would look good if they were to be ranked in this respect. Not many countries, in fact, even undertake efforts to measure whether they do well when it comes to carers, care workers and those using care. Indeed, care is a global challenge. The International Labour Organisation has summed it up some years ago already with its ‘Five Rs’ campaign. It argues that care, paid and unpaid, needs to be recognised more widely as a key social and economic activity, that unpaid care work should be reduced and redistributed, that paid care work needs to be better rewarded, and that paid care workers ought to obtain better representation (Addati et al., 2018).
Scotland’s National Performance Framework – care is absent
Scotland, unfortunately, does not belong to the small club of countries that have systems in place to tell the public and politicians whether they are doing well when it comes to the domain of care. We at the UWS-Oxfam Partnership wanted to push Scotland to the forefront of countries that care – or at least allow Scotland to assess itself to see if it is working towards being one such country or whether it’s left behind.
For that purpose, we proposed a comparatively simple change – a change that would add one new National Outcome to Scotland’s National Performance Framework (NPF).
Many readers may be unfamiliar with such frameworks generally and with the Scottish version, the NPF, specifically. That is not surprising as the NPF is underused for what it’s supposed to be used for: for measuring policy success or failure and for pointing out where government needs to do better or where it has done well. What we proposed was to add this to the existing eleven Outcomes: ‘We fully value and invest in those experiencing care and all those providing it’.
To measure this Outcome we developed seven Indicators:
- Quality of life of care workers, carers and those experiencing care
- Quality of care for all
- Financial wellbeing of care workers, carers and those experiencing care
- Voice and influence of care workers, carers and those experiencing care
- Access to education and training
- Adequacy of funding for care
- Job quality of social care and childcare workers
Get all of these moving into the right direction – and Scotland would demonstrate that it is a country that cares.
Politics and advocacy – so close to success
With our report on an Outcome on Care we expected to be successful with civil servants, government politicians, and parliamentarians from the opposition benches. After all, a new Outcome is not actual policy and certainly not costly. Adding it could signal that care is taken seriously and could revitalise the Scottish Government after its expensive failure to implement its much-vaunted National Care Service (NCS), a mechanism that it hoped would bring the long-standing social care crisis under control after the Covid-19 pandemic shone yet another light on how severe this crisis actually is. However, the NCS was abandoned and not much further substantial reform was made to the social care sector or to the supports granted to unpaid carers and those needing care.
But it turns out that ‘politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards’, as sociologist Max Weber put it over a 100 years ago.
After two years of advocacy for the new Outcome of care in the NPF by the newly founded A Scotland that Cares campaign, things looked promising. In May 2024, Scottish ministers backed a new Outcome on care and the Scottish Parliament began its own scrutiny. The final proposed National Outcome on Care read ‘We are cared for as we need throughout our lives and value all those providing care’. At this point, indicators had not been discussed, but the idea of revising the NPF and of adding a new Outcome on care seemed undisputed between Government and Parliament and there was little dissensus between parties in parliament.
But all of this changed with the upheaval within the Scottish Government which, in 2024, saw the First Minister resign and a new cabinet taking shape. The new Deputy First Minister, under whose remit the NPF falls, postponed the process of adding new Outcomes it indefinitely while making vague statements about a root-and-branch revision of the NPF.
In 2026, the next Scottish Parliament will be elected. It is unlikely that the government will come back to the NPF before the elections. This ‘last minute failure’ of the campaign demonstrates how difficult it is to tackle the ‘wicked problems’ of the domain of care. To conclude with Weber again, politics ‘takes both passion and perspective’ and ‘steadfastness of heart’.
That’s why the A Scotland that Cares coalition continues to advocate for a better Scotland.
Addati, L.; Cattaneo, U.; Esquivel, V.; Valarino, I. (2018). Report: Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work. International Labour Organisation.
About the author
Hartwig Pautz studied Political Science, Modern History and English Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Hannover (Germany) and at Liverpool John Moores University. Their research focuses on the role of knowledge and expertise in policy-making – in social and economic policy mainly.
