Social care is among the top concerns for Scottish voters. Recent polling places it as the sixth most important issue for people in deciding which party to vote for[1].

However, reading the 2026 Scottish Parliament election manifestos, there is a gap between public concern and political storytelling. Despite its importance to people, social care occupies only a fraction of each party’s manifesto – typically around 3–5% of total space[2].

All major political parties recognise that social care needs attention. Most offer commitments on unpaid carers, workforce pay, delayed discharge and access to support. However, the way the manifestos talk about social care reveals a deeper challenge: social care is rarely presented as being important to the public in its own right.

Instead, the dominant political frame is of social care as a resource that exists to relieve pressure on the NHS. Across manifestos, social care is repeatedly discussed in relation to delayed discharge, bed-blocking, freeing hospital capacity and reducing strain on emergency services. The political message is clear: social care really matters because of how it helps our hospitals to function.

The missing story is how social care, in itself, enables people across Scotland to live well. At its best, social care supports dignity, independence, relationships and participation in family and community life. People using social care, their families and friends, know this – but most manifestos overlook this story. This means that, in terms of social care, there is a disconnect between Scotland’s political parties and the experience and concerns of the Scottish public.

Some party manifestos do gesture towards how social care, in itself, helps people to live well. Scottish Labour opens strongly by describing social care as “crucial for the dignity of our family, friends and neighbours.” The SNP talks about independence, control and putting people at the heart of their own care. The Greens emphasise fairness, inclusion and care that is free at the point of need. The Liberal Democrats foreground unpaid carers and the importance of living independently. But even where parties start with clear values-based language, the dominant political story reverts to stabilising hospitals rather than describing what a good social care system makes possible in people’s lives independently of the NHS. 

The Scottish Conservatives emphasise delayed discharge, hospital flow and local authority control, reflecting a framing of social care closely tied to NHS performance and service delivery. Reform UK in Scotland argue for funding security for local authorities and improving support for carers, but offer no words about dignity, independence, or the vital everyday role that social care plays for so many people.

This disconnect also matters because if social care is mostly portrayed as existing to protect the NHS, the political response will focus on very narrow interventions. This framing misses the inherent importance of social care and the breadth of daily work that it does to support hundreds of thousands of people and families in Scotland to live well. Political parties are missing the opportunity to reflect existing public awareness of social care, and to value its role in itself – as an equal alongside all other public services.

One of the key challenges for the next Scottish Parliament will be to build a shared public – and political – understanding of social care as something that affects us all. The 2026 manifestos show we have a long way to go.

Jen Wallace and Richard Brunner lead https://reframingcare.stir.ac.uk/.

[1] IPSOS Scottish Political Monitor, Mar 2026, sourced 22 April 2026

[2] This estimate was generated by ChatGPT-assisted analysis. Each manifesto and each social care section and individual mention were uploaded and AI asked to identify the proportion of the documents referencing social care. It should be understood as indicative rather than a formal content analysis