What the 2026 Scottish manifestos really say about social care

macresearchandcons
Apr 26
6 min read

Published April 2026 — eleven days from polling

The 7 May 2026 Holyrood election arrives with social care in its most fragile state in a generation. Vacancy rates remain stubbornly above pre-pandemic levels, the National Care Service Bill has been buried in all but name, providers are squeezed between local authority commissioning rates and rising employer National Insurance contributions, and unpaid carers are doing more than ever. So what do the parties asking for your vote actually intend to do about it? This is a sector-eye read of the five main manifestos — SNP, Scottish Labour, Scottish Conservatives, Scottish Liberal Democrats and Scottish Greens — with Reform UK noted where they break new ground.

The big structural question: is there still a National Care Service?

The most striking thing about 2026 is that the policy that dominated the last Holyrood term — the SNP’s National Care Service — is barely visible in the SNP’s own manifesto. After successive retreats and the de facto withdrawal of the NCS Bill in 2024, the SNP has chosen to fight this election on incremental investment rather than structural reform. There is no fresh, named NCS commitment.

Scottish Labour has stepped into the gap. Anas Sarwar’s manifesto promises to “create a national care service worthy of the name,” with consistent national standards, but is studiously vague about the legal architecture — almost certainly because the previous version’s collapse made any maximalist proposal politically toxic. The Greens, characteristically, want something more radical, arguing the previous bill failed because it lacked ambition rather than because it overreached.

The Liberal Democrats want common national standards informed by a Health and Social Care Staff Assembly but stop short of calling it a national service. The Scottish Conservatives have planted a flag firmly in opposition: they pledge to resist “any future attempts to centralise social care” and to back local authority decision-making. Reform UK echoes that direction, promising councils greater flexibility and “secure long-term funding.”

For providers, this is the cleavage that matters. A re-elected SNP minority will probably govern social care through workforce, commissioning and digital reform rather than statute. A Labour-led administration would re-open structural reform — but on a narrower scope than the original NCS. Either way, you are unlikely to be implementing a fully-fledged NCS in the next parliament.

Workforce: a £15-an-hour consensus, but still no convergence on how to pay for it

If there is one number worth knowing it is £15 an hour. Both Scottish Labour and the Scottish Greens commit to that as a minimum for adult social care staff. The Liberal Democrats reframe the same ambition as a £28,500 annual minimum, plus dedicated key-worker housing investment. The SNP commits to national bargaining on pay and conditions — the structural lever that would make a sector-wide rate possible — but does not commit to a specific figure in the manifesto. The Conservatives do not commit to a specific rate at all.

The harder question — who pays — is where the manifestos thin out. The implied answer in the Labour and Green positions is the Scottish Government via uplifted commissioning rates and ring-fenced funding to local authorities. The IFS’s initial response to the Labour manifesto questioned whether the headline numbers can be reconciled with the party’s broader fiscal envelope, particularly given that any £15 floor in care would create immediate parity pressure across early years and adult social care more widely.

For providers, none of the manifestos meaningfully addresses the gap between any new pay floor and the rates councils actually pay under existing framework agreements. A statutory £15 floor without a corresponding rate uplift would be unviable for most independent providers — and that arithmetic is the issue most likely to be tested in the first 100 days of the next government.

There are two ancillary workforce commitments worth flagging. Labour proposes to require medical, dental and nursing students to work in Scotland for five years post-graduation or repay tuition — a striking measure that cuts across recruitment debates. The SNP would expand the Displaced Workers Scheme with £750,000 to support international recruitment. The Greens push for pay parity between NHS and social care nurses, which would have substantial knock-on cost implications for nursing home operators specifically.

Funding, charging and self-directed support

Both Labour and the Greens commit to ending non-residential care charges — a long-standing ask of the disability and carer sectors and a meaningful shift for working-age adults receiving SDS. Neither costs it precisely; the Fraser of Allander Institute’s analysis suggests this would run into the low hundreds of millions annually depending on implementation.

The SNP’s headline social care commitment is more modest and more targeted: a recurring “Complex Care Investment for Scotland,” beginning with £20 million, aimed at supporting people with the most complex needs — particularly those whose care packages have been a source of delayed discharge. The party estimates this would help around 400 people a year leave hospital sooner.

The Conservatives prefer a hospital-focused intervention: extra NHS funding to secure a “suitable care home” placement within 48 hours of someone being declared fit to leave. This is a demand-side commitment that effectively underwrites private and third-sector capacity at the hospital interface — although providers will note it does nothing about commissioning rates for the people already in services.

Hospital discharge and capacity

Delayed discharge is the political pressure point all parties are responding to. Labour pledges 1,000 additional care-at-home packages and 300 step-down beds. The Conservatives’ 48-hour placement guarantee, as above. The SNP’s complex-care fund. The Liberal Democrats focus on integration improvements. None of these alone solves the structural mismatch between hospital flow targets and community capacity, but the cumulative effect of any of them being implemented at speed would be felt in care homes and home-care services within months.

For care home operators, the Conservative pledge is the one with the most direct commissioning implications — a 48-hour guarantee implies premium spot-purchase rates and a return to higher use of independent capacity for hospital discharges, particularly in winter.

Regulation, ownership and the third sector

Labour’s manifesto promises to “crack down on poorly run care homes” through more frequent inspections and the public disclosure of compliance information. The Greens go further, proposing to transfer “failing” care homes into public or community ownership and signalling a longer-term ambition to shift the entire estate out of private hands. This is the most ideologically distinct social care position on offer and, while highly unlikely to translate into legislation in a single term, is worth tracking because it shapes the language of the wider debate.

The Conservative manifesto includes a provision that has alarmed third-sector providers: a requirement for all charities to declare “taxpayer funding,” with an implicit question over whether organisations heavily dependent on public money should be considered charities at all. For care charities and housing support providers — many of whom derive 80–90% of income from public commissioning — this would be a meaningful regulatory and reputational shift.

By contrast, the SNP, Labour, Greens and Liberal Democrats all commit to “long-term” or “multi-year” funding agreements with third-sector providers — a long-standing ask from the sector, though the manifestos differ on whether this means three years, five, or simply moving away from rolling annual renewals.

What’s missing

The most striking absence across all five manifestos is unpaid carers. Despite providing care worth tens of billions a year and propping up a system that would otherwise collapse, unpaid carers receive only glancing reference in most manifestos and no specific costed commitment in any. VOCAL’s election analysis describes this as the single biggest letdown of the 2026 campaign, and it is hard to disagree.

Technology and digital reform — the centrepiece of Scottish Care’s own pre-election manifesto — is similarly underdeveloped. None of the major parties commits specifically to scaling the Care Technologist programme, the Digital Support Hub, or to building ethical frameworks for AI in care. Given the workforce arithmetic, this is a strategic gap.

So what for providers?

Three practical implications for care providers preparing for any plausible election outcome.

First, model the £15 floor. Whatever the final form, a sector-wide pay floor of around £15 — or £28,500 — is now mainstream across three of the five manifestos. Providers should already be running rate-uplift scenarios with their commissioners to understand what would and would not be sustainable.

Second, expect more discharge-focused commissioning. The hospital-flow framing dominates 2026 manifestos in a way it did not in 2021. Providers with capacity and staffing flexibility for hospital discharges are likely to be preferred partners under any government.

Third, watch the third-sector regulation question. Whichever party wins, the next parliament is likely to revisit the rules on charity funding transparency. For organisations operating across the public, third and independent boundaries, governance and reporting clarity will move from desirable to essential.

The election on 7 May will not, in itself, fix social care. But it will shape the terms on which the sector tries to fix itself for the next five years — and the differences between these five manifestos matter more than the polling froth would suggest.