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1. The Group was conscious that it was carrying out its work against the background of legislation already in progress in England and Wales to address similar issues. The Carers and Disabled Children Act 2000 came into force on 1 April 2001. This Act has as its basis similar concerns to those considered by the Group, and the Group's recommendations mirror closely some of the provisions in the Act. However, in some respects the Group decided that different approaches might be more suitable and successful in the particular context of Scotland, and that the new framework of devolution offered the opportunity to pursue separate solutions for Scotland. The Group recognises that it is important for it to justify to Ministers and the public the case for promoting carers' interests in different ways in Scotland.
2. The 2000 Act introduces a right for carers to have an assessment in all circumstances, as the Group has recommended for Scotland too. The 2000 Act takes a different approach from that recommended by the Group by providing for carers to receive services or other support in their own right as a different form of support to community care services, and allows local authorities to ask carers to contribute to the cost of such services. The 2000 Act provides for carers to receive direct payments to help them make their own decisions about how and when to purchase support services, and it also provides for the range of services that may be provided to carers to be defined and limited in Regulations.
3. The Group believes that a different approach is possible in Scotland because of the different background and structures of social work services. The statute on which social work provision in Scotland is founded, the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968, takes a significantly different approach to the equivalent legislation in England and Wales. The 1968 Act allows local authorities to interpret need widely, and offers a flexible range of options for responding to need.
4. The Group concluded that this flexibility effectively means that in practice all the significant support needs of carers can already be met by local authorities under the 1968 Act - in conjunction as necessary with other agencies. The Group believes there is no need to change the law to provide for separate or new support to carers - the resources carers need should already be possible in Scotland. Where carers are not currently getting the support they need, the Group believes the difficulties spring from working practices, history and attitudes, which can be addressed without the need for legislation. The Group was also clear in its view that where external support is needed to maintain a caring relationship, such support must be seen as part of the overall care package for the cared-for person, not a service provided to the carer in their own right.
5. Clearly, a significant consequence of the difference between this Group's proposals and the approach taken in the 2000 Act is that we do not envisage carers as direct recipients of services in so far as their caring role goes, and thus we do not see a case for carers being asked to contribute to the cost of services or support. This approach avoids the need for complex debate about whether the cared-for person or the carer is the "primary beneficiary" of a particular support service, which would often be difficult and time-consuming for social work professionals to decide, and potentially divisive between carers and cared-for persons.
6. More fundamentally, the Group believes that approaching the issue in a way that avoids the need to consider imposing charges on carers for caring support is in line with the central theme of the Carers Strategy for Scotland which emphasises the need to recognise and value the enormous contribution carers make. It will also avoid carers in future being asked to contribute to the cost of support services that they are currently entitled to receive without payment - which would be a perverse outcome to flow from the first Carers Strategy for Scotland. An inevitable further consequence of introducing charging would be the risk that some carers might be deterred from seeking support they need by concern about the costs they might face.
7. The Group also had concerns, which it understands are shared by carers and their representatives in England and Wales, about how comprehensive or useful the range of the services that can be provided to carers under the 2000 Act will be. This range is to be defined in Regulations, but the Act itself appears to establish that none of these services can be of an "intimate" nature. The exact range of this definition has still to be worked out, but the Group was concerned that it seemed possible that many of the forms of support which would help carers most directly were likely to be excluded from any definition, and thus not available to carers under the 2000 Act (eg, sitting services, or short breaks). The benefit to carers of this approach was not clear to the Group, which concluded that its alternative approach of avoiding the concept of services to carers was preferable.
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