Despite warm words during the pandemic, Scotland’s charities are still the poor relation when it comes to government funding, the head of the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland has told healthandcare.scot.

Speaking ahead of the Alliance’s annual conference next week, Ian Welsh said politicians had recognised the key role played by third sector organisations during the virus crisis – but said the same groups had been left “teetering at the edge of bankruptcy” before the pandemic and would continue to do so if the situation reverted to business as usual.

With more than 3,000 members, the Alliance represents third sector groups working in health and social care across the country.

The Equally Valued: Equally Connected conference, which runs for five days from 7^th June, will hear from more than 50 speakers including Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer Gregor Smith.

It will also provide an opportunity to reflect on the contribution of national and local third sector charities during the pandemic.

Across the country these organisations have stood up to deliver great outcomes “in every kind of situation involving health and social care,” says Ian Welsh, “in food delivery, recovery, mental health, clinical priority areas.

“Just as we count the everyday heroes that have emerged during this pandemic…it’s a paradox that many of those same organisations were teetering at the edge of bankruptcy and financial challenge before the pandemic, and will be after the pandemic, unless there’s a [new] funding mechanism to deal with that.”

In the last two years the Scottish government introduced several national pots of money that third sector groups could apply to for support.

These were “faster, less hogtied by outcome measurement and built on a much more significant degree of trust” than the usual approach of local authorities doling out cash, according to Ian Welsh:

“If the third sector remain as supplicants at the feet of dispensing authorities or Health and Social Care Partnerships, then there won’t be real partnership locally, there will only be a servant relationship, and that’s not good enough anymore”.

The Alliance chief executive goes on to recount a conversation with a civil servant who claimed “trust is the new way forward,” following the close relationship that has developed between the statutory sector and the third sector during the pandemic.

Mr Welsh disagrees:

“Trust isn’t the new way forward. Resources are the new way forward.”

And he added this challenge to parliamentarians:

“I would say to everyone in government and all the new MSPs that are around… try and disrupt the mechanisms of financial settlement in government, and try and put money in the hands of local organisations that you’ve seen during the pandemic.”

 

Read more: Covid care cash not reaching providers; Social care held back until “crisis and emergency”; Charities’ joint call to address social care ‘chasm’

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