The Scottish Government has lost a two-year fight to conceal the work of a private consultancy firm paid £550,000 in taxpayers' money to advise on the botched National Care Service (NCS).

Documents released to Common Weal and seen by the Herald on Sunday raise questions over the tender, with one MSP saying the money has seemingly only paid for a "handful of slides."

There are demands for ministers come to parliament to make a statement.

The row comes as the Scottish Government insist they are still committed to the reform, despite postponing the parliamentary progress of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill.

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KPMG won a £545,000 contract to help develop the NCS in December 2021. They were tasked with "producing a Programme Business Case and Operating Models."

As part of that, they had to produce a paper detailing the Current Operating Model (COM) showing the situation in care as it is, and the Target Operating Model (TOM) setting out how the NCS could work.

Following the contract award, Nick Kempe, convener of the Common Weal Care Reform Group, submitted a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to try and better understand the decision-making process behind the award, the work being carried out, and the final products of the firm's work. 

The Scottish Government initially refused to disclose any information, citing exemptions related to policy development and the need to protect the free and frank exchange of views.

After Mr Kempe complained to the Scottish Information Commissioner, the government was forced to release some paperwork but continued to heavily redact the documents.

Again, the Scottish Government argued that the redactions were necessary to protect policy formulation and deliberation.

The government later claimed that the TOM and Business Case were already publicly available, citing letters sent to Parliamentary committees.

However, these letters simply provided links to documents that did not explicitly state they were authored by KPMG.

The Programme Business Case attached sent to the Finance Committee is dated December 2023, some eleven months after the Scottish Government made their “final payment” to KPMG for the work.

Meanwhile, a summary of the TOM sent to the Health Social Care and Sport Committee in February this year — which is attributed to KPMG — is a nine-slide PowerPoint summary.

Two of the slides are introductory and the last states “a full TOM document is in development”.

The released COM document, dated June 2022, came to 153 pages and, again, contained numerous redactions.

Further FOI review requests were submitted to challenge these redactions, arguing that it was in the public interest to understand the conclusions drawn from the COM and the government's actions in response to these conclusions.

The review response upheld most of the original redactions but did release a new version of the COM document with some additional information disclosed.

However, Mr Kempe was scathing over the quality of the presentation, describing it as a "mish-mash of previous work."

He said "The information that the Scottish Government has been forced to release is another kick in the teeth for all those stakeholders who have engaged in good faith with Scottish Ministers claims they wanted to co-design a National Care Service.

“Any listening government that had nothing to hide would have shared any work they had asked KPMG to do on the NCS openly, asked for feedback and from this developed coherent policy proposals.

“Instead, the Scottish Government has been playing the public by running two processes in parallel, both enormously expensive. It’s not surprising they have been forced to end the whole charade”

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Craig Dalzell, Head of Policy & Research at Common Weal added: "A lot of attention has been paid lately to how much money the Scottish Government has been spending on outside consultants like KPMG but comparatively little on the results of that spending.

“As we've seen now, the outcomes can be worryingly few. Had the Scottish Government published this public information promptly rather than fighting against the Freedom of Information process for more than two years, it would have served as an early warning sign of the lack of care they were putting into the National Care Service Bill and that legislation might not be in the critical mess that it is in now."

Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said: "If a handful of slides is all the Scottish Government got for more than half a million pounds of taxpayers' money then that would be an absolute scandal.

"This sorry affair seems to sum up the SNP's mistakes on this Bill - jargon-heavy management speak, shoddy attempts to patch up obvious holes and an insistence on doubling down on bad decisions.

“For four years, the SNP has wasted £30 million on a bureaucratic power grab that attracted clear opposition from every quarter.

"That money is the equivalent of the annual salary of 1,200 care workers. It is money that should have been spent on care staff and service users and on fixing community care so that people can leave hospital on time.”

Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour's Health and Social Care Spokesperson, said: "The fact that this SNP government seems to have frittered away £550,000 on private consultants, trying to come up with a model for the National Care Service, demonstrates why the Bill is failing.

"The SNP have no ideas and no vision for what a National Care Service should look like.

"Rather than work with local authorities, care providers and those directly receiving care, we have witnessed the SNP embark on a power grab while failing to share any useful insights with stakeholders.

"The £30m wasted on this botched Bill could have paid for a million hours of social care."

Scottish Conservative shadow cabinet secretary for health Dr Sandesh Gulhane accused the SNP of "squandering money." 

“[Social care minister] Maree Todd's handling of the Bill has been farcical. It is clear that she and her colleagues were asleep at the wheel in monitoring how this work was progressing despite spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on this external contract.

“With the plans for a National Care Service dead in the water, the SNP must be upfront about what happened with this contract, and why they tried to stonewall releasing information around it.

“While he might not have ordered this contract, [Health Secretary] Neil Gray has shown a blatant disregard for taxpayers’ money and has a responsibility to be upfront about his government’s actions on this.

"We must now get a statement in Parliament about the shambolic handling of the national care service."

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "This is an inaccurate description of the work that was carried out. KPMG provided advisory support on key functions during the early stages of the NCS programme.”