Unpaid carers - right to breaks and timescales for support plans: consultation

1. Introduction

1.1 Introducing the Right to Breaks

We estimate that there are around 700,000-800,000 adult carers and 27,000 young carers in Scotland. The Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 (“the Act”) gives these carers rights to help ensure they are identified and supported more consistently. Appropriate support will allow these carers to continue to care, if they wish, in good health and to have a life alongside caring.

The Act gives all carers the right to an adult carer support plan (ACSP) or young carer statement (YCS). An ACSP and YCS is a document setting out the carer’s personal outcomes, identified needs and support to be provided to meet those needs. An ACSP and YCS must contain information about whether support should be provided in the form of a break from caring. It is normally prepared by the carers’ local authority or a local carer organisation it funds to do this on its behalf.

The Independent Review of Adult Social Care (2021) recommended that these rights should be extended to give unpaid carers a specific right to breaks.

In the National Care Service consultation (2021) we asked participants to consider approaches to establishing a right to breaks from caring. Responses told us that people would prefer such a right to be open to all carers, but that what this looks like should be personalised depending on each person’s needs.

1.2 Changes to the law

The right to breaks provisions in the Care Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 are based on these findings. This new law will make changes to the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 to deliver a right to personalised short breaks support for carers who can’t currently access “sufficient breaks” from caring.

These changes will place new duties on Local Authorities (and Health and Social Care Partnerships) to decide whether a carer is able to take “sufficient breaks” from their caring role; and if not, to provide support to enable this. They must do this through dialogue with the carer while preparing their adult carer support plan or young carer statement.

The new legislation will also:

• require Ministers to set timescales for authorities to prepare adult carer support plans and young carer statements
• require local authorities to publish additional information on local short break availability in their short break services statements.

Final decisions on what will be included in regulations and the go-live date will be made by incoming Ministers after the 2026 Scottish elections, based on the groundwork being done now.

1.3 What comes next

In preparing for implementation this consultation seeks opinions on:

• The definition of the key term, “sufficient breaks”
• Types of breaks that should be in scope
• Timescales for preparing ACSP and YCS
• Transitional arrangements from the current system to the new right to breaks

The options in this consultation have been developed with input from the Regulations and Guidance Working Group and the Right to Breaks Steering Group. These are made up of unpaid carers, carer support organisations, carer centre managers, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) and statutory organisations including local authorities, health and social care, finance and social work.

To ensure that carers and those that support them have the chance to share their views, we now want to better understand what these proposed options might mean to people in relation to their experience of providing or receiving unpaid care.

Consultation responses will be analysed and considered with input from the Steering Group. Your responses will help Scottish Government to develop the final regulations and associated guidance which are needed to support effective delivery of these new rights.

This consultation is open for a period of 12 weeks.

We invite you to share your views to each of the questions below.