Free personal care of the elderly has, up to now, been the flagship policy of devolution in Scotland. All political parties in Scotland are signed up for it, despite the continuing opposition of Labour at Westminster, including Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, who have believed from day one that it is financially unsustainable and politically naive.

More than 50,000 Scots have received free personal care at home, including washing, meals and dressing, at a cost of £256 million a year since 2002 when it was introduced. Annual costs are projected to rise to £813 million by 2031, when Scotland will have 1.3 million pensioners.

Mr Brown, Mr Darling and the other opponents may, in the long run, turn out to be right. Lord Sutherland of Houndwood — the architect of the policy and the man who led a recent review of the how it was working in Scotland — found that free care needed an immediate injection of £40 million to ensure that the policy was implemented consistently across Scotland. Another report, from the Audit Scotland watchdog, found that the shortfall may be as much as £63 million.

The Sutherland review, while declaring that the policy was “sound”, also reignited a row with London when it called for the reinstatement of £30 million a year in attendance allowance payments for Scottish pensioners, withdrawn when Holyrood introduced free personal care six years ago. The demand has been dismissed by Whitehall.

As the Sutherland report acknowledged, free personal care is hugely popular in Scotland and any attempt by a future devolved administration to curtail or withdraw it would provoke such an outcry that no group of politicians would now dare contemplate it.

However, doubts have persisted about the affordability of free personal care and the review said that more than half of local authorities in Scotland were rationing access to it. Some do not provide services for people with moderate needs or record them as formally waiting for services. Some provide preparation of meals within the free care package, others do not.

Lord Lipsey, the Labour peer who sat on the original Sutherland Commission that laid the groundwork for free care but who dissented from its findings, has said: “I sometimes thought that Lord Sutherland was made for a heaven where money grows on trees. Despite the fact that half the authorities in Scotland are rationing care, spending on it in 2008 already exceeded that planned for the third decade of the present century.”

The recent report by Audit Scotland said that there had to be better planning and funding of the policy. It found that there had a been an annual shortfall of between £7 million and £63 million and added that there was still confusion over what was covered by the policy, and even whether councils were obliged to fund it.

However, despite the warnings, the Scottish Parliament will this week agree with the findings of the Sutherland review and ministers will be told to find ways to cover present and future shortfalls. And Mr Brown and Mr Darling can do nothing about it.

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