Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Long-Term Care
Any preferential spending in Scotland (such as free personal care for the elderly, and such as the abolition of student fees), must be extended to the whole United Kingdom, paid for by a reduction in the block grant to the Scottish devolved body, which has its own revenue-raising powers with which to make up the shortfall. Easy.
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Two points on this:
ReplyDelete1) Personal care for the elderly in Scotland isn't free at all. The personal care payment has been frozen at £145 per week since the policy's introduction, while care home fees have increased. That means that in reality, "free care" is a contribution towards care home fees, topped up by personal/family contributions. By 2004, the average total cost of staying in a Scottish care home was £427 per week (they'll be much higher now), which means that well over half the cost still had to be met by the individual, not the taxpayer.
2) If you reduce the block grant to Scotland by enough to cover the enormous cost of free personal care and the abolition of student fees across the UK, there won't be much of the block grant left - if anything. But Scotland is not responsible for the policies followed in the rest of the UK. What you're effectively doing is penalising a devolved Scotland for any policies they enact which are different from those in the rest of the UK. Are you also proposing that if the Scottish parliament cuts services below the level of the rest of the UK, the block grant should be increased to compensate them?
"If you reduce the block grant to Scotland by enough to cover the enormous cost of free personal care and the abolition of student fees across the UK, there won't be much of the block grant left - if anything."
ReplyDeletePull the other one. But even so, that's where the existing, never been used, fiscal power comes in.
"Are you also proposing that if the Scottish parliament cuts services below the level of the rest of the UK, the block grant should be increased to compensate them?"
No, because to whom would such compensation be paid? But this question will arise soon enough, now that economically one of the most Thatcherite parties on earth is running things at Holyrood.